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https://archive.ph/9BKTB

The court decision itself is worth reading for a revealing look behind the curtain. [0]

>> In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees crafting the warning screen for Project Michigan discussed how best to frame its language. Mr. Onak suggested the warning screen should include the language: “By continuing on the web, you will leave the app and be taken to an external website” because “‘external website’ sounds scary, so execs will love it.” [...] One employee further wrote, “to make your version even worse you could add the developer name rather than the app name.” To that, another responded “ooh - keep going.”

[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...

The most shocking thing to me about that isn't the malicious compliance, but that even after a court injunction, and fully knowing that there could be subsequent discovery, they have people putting something like that in writing.

Seriously, this is one of the top 10 largest companies in the world, and they're playing chicken with the court in order to preserve their ongoing revenue. These weren't random employees, but people part of "Project Michigan", Apple's "activities relating to Injunction compliance".

How doesn't every single person that's a part of that project have an Apple lawyer hovering over them every time they get near any sort of device that can put anything on the record?

"The most shocking thing to me about that isn't the malicious compliance, but that even after a court injunction, and fully knowing that there could be subsequent discovery, they have people putting something like that in writing."

Keep in mind that once you lose, the process is no longer adversarial. In ~all cases you will be required to provide evidence and status updates and such on implementation of an injunction, among other things.

So you do practically have to keep records of what you are doing to comply. These are the kinds of records you would normally see as a result. The only shocking thing is that they didn't lie :)

They often do try to hide bad stuff through privilege anyway - I believe they tried here and lost but i will go back and look - but that doesn't often work.

> you do practically have to keep records of what you are doing to comply

I would argue that the text the parent comment has pulled out is not part of the record keeping you need to do to comply. Lawyers will tell you to have certain conversations in person, and it is surprising that some of these conversations happened in text instead of in person.

i'm aware of what lawyers tell you sometimes, since i am in fact, a lawyer in addition to being an engineer, but you have to think about the context as well. You aren't talking about trying to avoid another side finding it in mountains of discovery, you are talking about trying to avoid a judge who easily has the power to force your engineers to testify under oath about what they are doing, finding out about what you are doing.

This is a very bad plan :)

On top of that I'll also offer to you that the days of trying to avoid generating evidence as a mechanism for avoiding bad things happening are fast dying after google got sanctioned for having off the record conversations for exactly this reason.

It's bad advice - the better advice i used to give my clients is - if you are not doing anything wrong, don't act like you are doing anything wrong. If you are doing something wrong, stop.

    > If you are doing
    > something wrong, stop.

It's not like they couldn't afford competent legal advice, and surely they either knew they were flaunting the injunction, or could have predicted that the judge would take this view of their activity.

So, they're set on doing the "wrong" thing, but could still use legal advice.

What I'm amazed at up-thread is how seemingly incompetent they were at changing their workflow so they wouldn't hand the court evidence on a silver platter.

In this case, surely they could have pulled all the stakeholders into a room with a whiteboard, and made sure nobody kept any records of the meeting.

They'd have ended up with the same wording, but the court couldn't have merely done a text search of relevant Slack conversations.

Yes, the court could have eventually forced everyone who was in that room to testify, but the end result would have been a bunch of "I think so-and-so wanted it more such-and-such".

Surely that's better than the sort of quotes the court could copy/paste into its decision.

At some point it has to be documented as to the decisions made and the reasoning.

If there is literally no documentation up until the final moment, doesn't that itself act as evidence that they were consciously and deliberately not wanting their reasoning documented?

Why not just do the right thing. Damn.

"So, they're set on doing the "wrong" thing, but could still use legal advice."

As a lawyer, that is your time to exit the scene. There are no airquotes that should be around wrong here. This isn't advocacy for some not-ethically-amazing legal position that has yet to be decided on. They lost already. They have already been found guilty. You are now under an active (IE not stayed) court order. If your client then is basically saying "well how do we ignore the court order and do the illegal thing anyway", helping them them is not defensible.

"What I'm amazed at up-thread is how seemingly incompetent they were at changing their workflow so they wouldn't hand the court evidence on a silver platter."

You (and others) are amazed because you think this would have worked. I don't know why. I mean, i kind of get it - I would guess you assume this because hiding things from showing up in discovery (a very different part of the process) used to work better. FWIW - It doesn't work anymore, either. See google being heavily sanctioned for doing exactly this, for example.

Beyond that - assume for a second that the lawyers involved are not morons. Assume they are instead, very smart people. Given that, why not assume that maybe your view of what would have worked might be wrong?

"In this case, surely they could have pulled all the stakeholders into a room with a whiteboard, and made sure nobody kept any records of the meeting."

Try it sometime after you get enjoined and see what the judge does to you. I've never seen it go well, but hey, maybe someone has.

While sometimes very smart people are idiots, it's not that common.

"but the end result would have been a bunch of "I think so-and-so wanted it more such-and-such"."

Uh, i think you are sort of dreaming here. Or just lying to the judge? Or maybe you've never actually been grilled by a judge in this situation. I dunno.

In any case, i think the judge would have gotten nearly the same info, if not more, but also would have been a lot more pissed and made a lot more criminal referrals :)

Lots of judges are former prosecutors, litigators, or defense attorneys.

Who don't get to have that kind of fun of cross-examining people, etc, anymore.

In this case she's a former private litigator for many years.

Good luck with your strategy of telling her "I dunno what happened, we just sort of talked about stuff".

This is like the scene from the dark knight where he wants to blackmail batman.

"Surely that's better than the sort of quotes the court could copy/paste into its decision."

I don't believe so. I think the judge would have written something making them look even more stupid, evil, and criminal.

they did try to hide some of this stuff, by abusing attorney client privilege, which is one of the reasons the judge is SO pissed at them.

>they did try to hide some of this stuff, by abusing attorney client privilege

I don't know a thing about the legal system: if someone gets caught doing that sort of thing, does that incur additional punishments?

I mean, if you do something illegal, and when the police arrest you they prove that you were trying to hide it from them, that's another charge. How does that work if the court catches you doing it?

> THE COURT FURTHER FINDS that Apple’s abuse of attorney-client privilege designations to delay proceedings and obscure its decision-making process warrants sanction to deter future misconduct. Apple is SANCTIONED in the amount of the full cost of the special masters’ review and Epic’s attorneys’ fees on this issue alone through approximately May 15, 2025, the anticipated date of completion.

So pretty mild thus far. As far as I remember from reading other court decisions, court-imposed sanctions against individual lawyers are also a thing. As far as the clients are considered, given production of documents is mandated by a court order, presumably this counts as defying a court order and so any punishments would fall under criminal contempt?

(Not a lawyer, in case this wasn’t clear from the above already.)

> Seriously, this is one of the top 10 largest companies in the world, and they're playing chicken with the court in order to preserve their ongoing revenue.

Maybe that is a result of the attitudes that made them one of the largest companies in the world?

Other way around. Too big to fail and individual employees are too isolated from any consequences so they have no reason to give a shit.

Or both. Vicious circle.

People put everything in writing and in videos nowadays and don't even think about it. Often it's "not so smart" criminals but we see again and again that even people are the highest levels do the same...

It is not always a question of smart of vs not smart. At times, you will see people say something in an email or chat for no other reason than 'now it is part of the record'.

CYA, always be building a paper trail in systems of record. "Will this be committed to something with a retention schedule and that is subject to a potential legal hold?" hits return

The phrase "incandescent with rage" comes to mind when reading that order. A couple of choice quotes:

To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath.

This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction.

She also referred Alex Roman's actions and everyone else complicit for review of contempt of court, which carries a possible prison sentence. I never thought Apple would outright defy the courts to the degree they'd risk a prison term for the executives.

Is it surprising? If the revenue realized by the ongoing defiance of the courts exceeds the cost of replacing the executive (including any risk premium caused by the risk of jail time in that job) then it seems rational for Apple as an entity to continue to defy the law.

Even if these executive positions carried a guarantee of a several year term in minimum or medium security prison, for the salaries involved they should be able to find someone who is reasonably competent and willing to do the job.

It's not like the corporate entity itself can be threatened with state violence, and it's owners (probably half the US!) are insulated from any real consequences. An entity like Apple really has diffused responsibility to the point that it transcends the law at this point, and it becomes perfectly rational for it to defy the courts.

You seem to be ignoring the question of why any executive would be dumb enough to risk actual jail time to further the interests of the inhuman, soulless entity that is Apple Computer.

Because they're getting paid tens of millions. same reason people join criminal organizations, really. the profit outweighs the potential downsides.

I wonder if Alex Roman was pulled aside by the caporegime and told that if he takes the fall for this one, he'll be a made man once he's out of prison.

They'll defy the courts for profit but not for warrants and surveillance requests. Telling

Do they defy the courts in China or just in the US?

> I never thought Apple would outright defy the courts to the degree they'd risk a prison term for the executives.

He probably got offered a couple mil for a slap on the wrist, he likely won't even be jailed for a day. Why wouldn't they lie? They have the money to get away with it.

Give the current situation with people ignoring the court (cough into the presidency) with no consequences, what do you expect them to do? Take the courts seriously?

Now, practically speaking, that exposes them to the Court taking all their frustration out on the execs. Oops.

You do realize that they ignored the court order -during- Biden's administration, not Trump's, right?

[dead]

It's so jarring to get these kinds of message, especially for compliance with EU directives, because it's so obviously designed to look un-Apple-like which triggers some sort of malware or scam heuristic without the typical nice Apple presentation.

Ironically it ends up getting flagged as some deliberate Apple malicious compliance BS which just sours you on the whole iOS experience.

I'm not even sure how "external website" is malicious compliance. Yes, I know the intention is to sound scary. But external website is the correct, neutral term which means... external website.

What does external mean here? Why are Apple services not external?

To you and me, sure. On the other hand, I wonder if is intended to scare people who like and want the safety of the apple ecosystem and perceive everything as outside of it as dark web. Come to think of it, that is kinda how I see dark web.. is there a scarier place on line than that?

I think it would be easy to argue that the term "external website" is neutral rather than scary sounding, if not for actual chat logs in evidence saying "let's use this term because it's scary sounding".

It kind of surprises me that people working in that environment haven't been better trained about what not to write. I have zero legal background, but even twenty years ago at my very first corporate job I received a training module about legal discovery and the consequences of poorly worded emails -- and that was at a company that I genuinely believe was trying to follow the law in good faith, and was simply worried about liability due to misperception of careless language.

For a team specifically working on a legal compliance project, I am with the poster above that mentioned legal teams providing oversite. If nothing else, every one of these chats should have had a lawyer logged in to provide a mental reminder to participants that the conversation really isn't private.

You're posting on HN and you think regular websites are the "dark web"? Do you think HN is the dark web?

Hm. Maybe I did not phrase it correctly. I was presenting two perspectives: one of a user, who thinks net outside walled garden is dangerous and user who regularly traverses non-walled garden that the first user perceives as dark net. That was followed by: is there a place darker than dark net:D

Apologies, there are times I do not express myself as clearly as I would want to.

Why does it need to be labeled at all? Is opening netflix.com while in the Netflix app really an external website?

Jesus Christ. How worse can they be? Willfully malicious

Now we will have corporate training programs teaching us to say "inform the user" when we mean "scare the user", and then this wont show up in court. Just like how Microsoft taught us to never say "crush the competition". They will do all the same things though.

Then that training will get called into evidence (like Google’s prior training re: anti competitive training) to prove they were being intentionally anti-competitive, and rinse repeat.

I’ve worked for one BigTech company in my career and there were a list of banned words we couldn’t say in writing. The one word I remember we couldn’t say was “moat”.

I wonder if they implemented some filter that prevented messages containing those words from posting. Return a 401 or 403.

You give way too much credit to the capabilities of Chime. (how do you say where you worked without saying where you worked)

I received training like this over 20 years ago as a brand new engineer at my first job. The training was literally about how to avoid writing emails that could create legal liability due to careless language. Emails that came out during the Ford Pinto lawsuits were used as examples. It was all carefully worded to be about not being misperceived in court.

That job was at an avionics company working on safety critical systems. They paid tons of lip service to always placing safety first -- and from what I personally witnessed, at least at that time, the concern was genuine. There was a culture of taking the responsibility seriously, at least at the engineering level I interacted with.

Even acting in good faith though, things happen. Planes crash (usually due to pilot error), and when they do everyone gets sued, and when that happens careless language represents a risk for a company, even if they did everything right.

Having moved on to consumer tech, I haven't seen similar cultures of doing the "right thing". That could be the modern world, my own cynicism, or just the differences inherent to industries where lives aren't explicitly on the line. Regardless, it's not at all hard to imagine that employees can be taught to self censor in ways that won't themselves create more liability.

Honestly, I’ve seen way, waay, waaaaaaaaaaaaaay worse in internal comms in different companies. Not trying to defend Apple, but this just sounds like an average conversation to me.

I mean, that's just evidence that they really are doing illegal shit and should be punished for it.

Or that they are doing legal shit that has the appearance of doing illegal shit, and will get into a lot of trouble more trouble than they want if it ever goes to trial.

Nobody stops you from texting your friends about buying ten pounds of cocaine, (when you actually meant confectioner's sugar), but putting it in writing may make your life more difficult if at some point, by happenstance, you might end up the defendant in a narcotics trial. Even if you are completely innocent.

Unless the judge actually specified the type of language to be used, this seems completely compliant.

Are they supposed to say "Please use our competitor. You'll find your experience with them far superior to what we provide" or something similar?

Lawyer here - that's not how these things work. This is definitely non-compliant.

Injunctions are, intentionally, required only to "describe in reasonable detail the act or acts restrained or required". The key being "reasonable". They are not required to specify every detail, or every wrong or right thing, especially when the party being enjoined knows more of the details of how things work than the court does.

You seem to believe the court must specify language, etc, and they are absolutely not required to do so. It is your job to figure it out, and if you need more information, shockingly, you can ask the judge for the information, or whether your proposed approach would be compliant.

You are also required to make good faith attempts to comply with a court order. The evidence here is overwhelming bad faith - they were not trying to figure out how to actually ensure the court's goals were carried out, they are instead trying to figure out how to thwart them. That is pretty much the definiton of bad faith.

The injunction has reasonable detail. This is neither good faith, nor did they ask.

You seem to think this is game of try to find legal loopholes. That is a good way to get thrown in a jail by a judge.

It's not. Once you are found guilty and injunction entered, the adversarial process is done. You lost.

Your job is to do what the court requires of you, in good faith, as best you can.

Even if you appeal it, unless it is stayed, you are still required to do it.

Would this still be clear bad faith had these chat logs not been created?

In other words, could Apple have done these exact same actions and successfully argued that the language ("external website") was in fact neutral, if not for the direct written record that established their intent to do otherwise?

Everything you just said makes sense, but the details of how the courts manage to enforce orders like this are interesting, and it seems like enforcing notions of good faith must be extremely difficult.

Thanks for writing this though, this is a window into a space I have never played in. The legal system is very mysterious to me.

"Would this still be clear bad faith had these chat logs not been created?"

Yes, almost certainly. The party claiming non-compliance has to prove your non-compliance, but they do not have to prove your bad faith.

Instead, the burden falls to the enjoined party to prove good faith.

Affirmative good faith usually comes up more in trying to dissolve injunctions, etc (where the enjoined party has to prove good faith) than civil contempt of an order.

This is because in the case of civil contempt, Judges still have discretion to find you in contempt even if you acted in good faith. IE bad faith will definitely get you contempt, but good faith alone will not save you from it. You can act in good faith, not do enough, and still be found in contempt for not doing enough. This helps dissuade malicious compliance as well.

See, generally, mccomb and friends:

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/336/187/

"The absence of willfulness does not relieve from civil contempt. Civil as distinguished from criminal contempt is a sanction to enforce compliance with an order of the court or to compensate for losses or damages sustained by reason of noncompliance . . . . Since the purpose is remedial, it matters not with what intent the defendant did the prohibited act . . . . An act does not cease to be a violation of a law and of a decree merely because it may have been done innocently. The force and vitality of judicial decrees derive from more robust sanctions. And the grant or withholding of remedial relief is not wholly discretionary with the judge. . . . The private or public rights that the decree sought to protect are an important measure of the remedy."

>You seem to think this is game of try to find legal loopholes. That is a good way to get thrown in a jail by a judge.

What I don't get is that sometimes it seems that is the game, sometimes the legal loopholes are accepted and other times they are not. It feels one of the big benefits of hiring a good lawyer is that they know which loopholes are accepted and which are seen as spiting the authority of the courts.

Two things:

Don't confuse the adversarial process with the post-adversarial process.

Don't confuse civil and criminal cases.

On the first: The adversarial process is between two sides, maybe you and a company, or two companies, or you and the government, whatever. The adversarial process ends when someone wins or loses.

During the adversarial process, the judge is basically a referee. This is an oversimplification, but close enough. Beyond that, they mostly are trying to get all of the info out on the table, so the dispute can be resolved.

If you want to be an asshole to the other side, you can be as much of an asshole as the referee lets you get away with, and this is going to vary depending on lots of things. This is true in many contexts (sports, for example).

But once that's done, the judge is not a referee anymore. They decide the remedy. If you are an asshole to them, that is not going to go well.

This is also true in many contexts - talk shit to the guy who knocked you down on the pitch, maybe you get a yellow card. Talk shit to the ref after they card you, they'll throw your ass out of the game, and fine or suspend you afterwards for doing it.

On the second - criminal cases have both a different burden of proof, and a different effective set of expectations of behavior, because of the stakes.

FWIW - the various rules of professional conduct explicitly go into various roles and hats that lawyers (and judges) often wear, and the acceptable behaviors during those roles.

Jeez, it's almost like cases are different from each other. It's almost like sometimes some laws are different from others. It might even then follow that when the facts are different, different outcomes can result from the application of law.

Let's cut to the fundamental argument here. Government should NEVER be allowed to dictate your state of mind and should NEVER be allowed to dictate based on feelings instead of facts.

If the judge wanted "reasonable" in that sense, then they should have defined the limits of reasonable. The assumption that "reasonable is what I the judge consider reasonable" is bad in every conceivable way. You can't read the judge's mind. If they didn't say exactly what they meant, then it is the judge that is at fault.

Next, the judge is an expert in law -- NOT an expert in humane interface, UI, or UX. They are in NO position to exert their amateur, ignorant opinion as fact and no effort was made by the judge to consult experts in the field about what would generally be considered "reasonable".

Finally, reasonable is subject to the facts and how those facts are subjectively viewed. Most Apple employees likely view this ruling as bad for their consumers and feel an obligation to protect their 1.4B iPhone users. From this perspective, discussing how to dissuade people from making decisions that could harm them would be very reasonable even if that discussion had a light-hearted tone or some joking along the way.

As an aside, I actively dislike what mostly amounts to forcing Apple to implement California state law outside of the state of California. I get no vote in California and should not be expected to abide by their laws in which I have no say. This whole thing should have been dealt with a the Federal level as it is obviously about interstate commerce and should have been legislated by congress rather than a politically-appointed judge that nobody voted for.

The law isn't some objective truth. Reckless endangerment, harassment, etc. don't have every form of those outlined. But if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's a duck.

If the people involved don't have the brain cells to figure this out, maybe Apple should employ smarter people, because it's about to cost them a lot. And I don't even necessarily mean the UI people - anything would go through legal. I have contracted for companies that have had legal judgements similar to, but not exactly, like this, and they erred on the side of caution. Everything went through legal. And yes, that can mean not doing stuff your competitor does because you stepped too far over the line. Oh well, you fucked up big time and now you have a magnifying glass on you.

But Apple is too stupid or too bold to have an ounce of sense here.

The idea that people can follow laws based upon 'feelings' but billion dollar corporations can't is ridiculous. Fuck them, they 100% knew what they were doing.

Something like reckless endangerment is criminal rather than civil. It will involve subject matter experts (SMEs) presenting both sides. It will involve a jury of peers with various perspectives rather than just the Judge's perspective making it less subject to individual bias. It will involve one person (the accused) or multiple people only if it can be clearly proven that they worked in direct concert with each other. The bar for conviction is much higher and you wouldn't find yourself deciding the Mens Rea of person A based on messages person B sent to person C (text messages lack enough context that all but the most flagrant statements won't constitute "beyond reasonable doubt"). Once the sentence is handed down, the penalties will be clear and with essentially zero room for "good faith" or "reasonableness" in its execution. SMEs will almost certainly be completely unrelated to the final ruling.

Basically none of that applies here. This is a civil case. It did not involve a jury. The group tasked with carrying out the ruling were not involved with the trial either directly or indirectly. The ruling was vague because the judge as I understand it wasn't a SME and wasn't qualified to write what she wrote. Rather than consult SMEs to reach a reasonable conclusion, she proceeded (unreasonably I might add as it is unreasonable for someone to pretend to be an expert in something they know little about) to pretend she was an expert anyway.

After her vague guidelines didn't get the results she thought it should, it seems that rather than discuss, she doubled down on SMEs needing to read her mind to decide what she considered reasonable rather than what other SMEs might consider reasonable then leveraged her position as judge to punish their lack of understanding (which seems very close to acting in bad faith to me) instead of reflecting on what could have been done differently and changing accordingly.

Regardless of how you feel about this particular case (personally, I'm in favor of opening up iOS to other stores rather than this third-party website bandaid), the court's actions and expectations are flawed in this case.

Do you think experts don't testify in civil cases?

I find these really elaborate rants about the law, which are based on nothing but presumptions, and in this case, presumptions that do not even arise from actual personal experience, to be incredibly exhausting and in service of creating more confusion than anything else.

Like, you just said upthread that courts shouldn't rely on the word reasonable? I cannot think of an easier way to express that you have absolutely no experience with the legal system than that. It's for sure a common misconception of programmers that the law should function the way code does. What's sad about that is that you are somehow so devoid of actual life experience as to not realize how it must be the case that something like the law must not function like source code out of necessity.

I'm familiar with what exists -- I simply think it is flawed.

I never said SMEs don't testify in civil cases. My contention was that the judge should have consulted SMEs when defining parts of the ruling outside her expertise.

You aren't making a case for reasonableness as a concept. You are simply asserting that it exists, so it must continue to exist with the implication that it is good. You seem to be further implying that an assertion of reasonableness by a judge should carry the same weight as an assertion of reasonableness by SMEs or a jury of peers.

Can you defend these assertions?

I didn't say you said that. I asked if you thought that. Once again, that's a faciallly unreasonable response. Just to demonstrate that reasonable is a workable term that need not be this vague unlawful mystery that you decided is the case, entirely on your own.

>My contention was that the judge should have consulted SMEs when defining parts of the ruling outside her expertise.

The case consists almost entirely of the testimony of experts and the professionals working on both sides, so I think the judge is actually very familiar with the issues at play here and I'm not sure why you came to the conclusion that this kind of expertise was not considered when its the very nature of the entirety of the case.

>You aren't making a case for reasonableness as a concept.

I don't need to. It is not my obligation to defend the legal system because you have your own ridiculous and unfounded assumptions.

>You seem to be further implying that an assertion of reasonableness by a judge should carry the same weight as an assertion of reasonableness by SMEs or a jury of peers.

Judges make orders. SMEs don't and can't. And lol at the idea you are suggesting that a layman jury should define these things. It is clear to me that you do not understand the role of a jury in a trial. Jury's determine disputed facts. Nothing more, nothing less.

>Can you defend these assertions?

The issue isn't defending them. The issue is convincing you, an incredibly unreasonable person. That's probably not going to happen judging by the conversations I see you engaged with here.

But hey, I'm glad you came up with your own idea as to how the legal system should work, seemingly without any actual experience outside of reading the news. Very smart kid energy.

> The case consists almost entirely of the testimony of experts and the professionals working on both sides, so I think the judge is actually very familiar with the issues at play here and I'm not sure why you came to the conclusion that this kind of expertise was not considered when its the very nature of the entirety of the case.

Those experts spent collective centuries learning their area of expertise, but the judge became familiar with everything over the course of this one trial...

> I don't need to. It is not my obligation to defend the legal system because you have your own ridiculous and unfounded assumptions.

I've provide an argument that it is not. You have provided an unsubstantiated assertion. If you aren't willing to engage, then why make the assertion in the first place?

> The issue is convincing you, an incredibly unreasonable person.

You have made zero reasoned arguments and outright refused to make any reasoned arguments, but consider me to be the unreasonable person who just won't listen to what you have to say. How does this make sense to you?

> Judges make orders. SMEs don't and can't. And lol at the idea you are suggesting that a layman jury should define these things. It is clear to me that you do not understand the role of a jury in a trial. Jury's determine disputed facts. Nothing more, nothing less.

If a judge rules that a bridge should be built, that doesn't mean they should tell the engineers how to build it. You are confusing the legal ruling with the implementation.

In this example, the engineers put in a suspension bridge and the judge got angry because it wasn't a truss bridge even though a truss bridge wasn't specified in the ruling and the judge has no real idea why one might choose one bridge type over the other.

If the type of bridge mattered, it was the judge's responsibility to talk with the parties involved and reach a decision then add that decision to the final ruling.

In this specific case, the judge should have gotten SMEs together to decide which approach was correct and included it in the ruling rather than complain that things weren't as the judge envisioned, but never even bothered to write down other than in the vaguest terms. Holding someone in contempt because they didn't read your mind is unreasonable.

>Those experts spent collective centuries learning their area of expertise, but the judge became familiar with everything over the course of this one trial...

And?

>I've provide an argument that it is not. You have provided an unsubstantiated assertion. If you aren't willing to engage, then why make the assertion in the first place?

Your argument is an unsubstantiated assertion. That you think it isn't is one of the things that makes this conversation incredibly unenjoyable.

>You have made zero reasoned arguments and outright refused to make any reasoned arguments, but consider me to be the unreasonable person who just won't listen to what you have to say. How does this make sense to you?

You being unreasonable is absolutely not predicated upon me or anything I have to say in particular, but instead seems to be a consistent pattern in your posting throughout this entire article.

>If a judge rules that a bridge should be built, that doesn't mean they should tell the engineers how to build it. You are confusing the legal ruling with the implementation.

But that's not what happened and its an incredibly strained analogy.

>In this specific case, the judge should have gotten SMEs together to decide which approach was correct and included it in the ruling rather than complain that things weren't as the judge envisioned, but never even bothered to write down other than in the vaguest terms. Holding someone in contempt because they didn't read your mind is unreasonable.

Only one of the parties is complaining. They also happen to be the party in violation of the court order. I think you do not really seem to get the point. They are in contempt because they did not bother to make a good faith effort to comply, not because they did not read his mind.

This is probably one of the most unenjoyable conversations I've had here because you are highly argumentative, incredibly uninformed on the topic you are arguing about, and starting it from such an absurdly low point that getting to a basic level conversation on this topic is impossible because you are busy arguing about things that are non-issues, like the use of the world reasonable in legal proceedings.

> so it must continue to exist with the implication that it is good

The purpose and reason why these concepts are absolutely good would be specifically because people like you, with your attitude exist.

The purpose of the law isn't to play this game of bad faith find the loophole. Instead, the purpose is to make people follow both the letter and the intent of it.

And The reason why vague concepts like this are good, is because people who try to get around the law should be punished as harshly as possible, through whatever teh most effective means necessary are, specifically so as to discourage this behavior of trying to get around the law.

It is much better for society if people and companies are trying to act in good faith to follow the law, instead of going around trying to find clever ways to break it. Thats why the bad actors should be punished as much as possible, if they are trying clever tricks.

Then we should just eliminate all the laws and instead pass one law that says "don't be evil" and just let the judges/juries make it up as they go.

The truth is that you don't believe your own argument. You want LOTS of laws specifying all kinds of unacceptable behaviors in great detail. You only differ from me in where that line should be drawn.

If we ditched "reasonableness" as a legal concept, even the most basic laws like e.g. the ones about murder would be significantly affected. So what you're proposing is a drastic redesign, and the onus is on you to demonstrate that it is even workable.

How do you envision the legal system dealing with issues such as intent and negligence without the notion of a "reasonable person"?

> If we ditched "reasonableness" as a legal concept, even the most basic laws like e.g. the ones about murder would be significantly affected. So what you're proposing is a drastic redesign, and the onus is on you to demonstrate that it is even workable.

Reasonableness is a quick approximation for world view or "the majority values and lived experiences of a specific culture at a specific time and place". For example, dueling is considered murder, but was once considered absolutely reasonable and NOT requesting a duel in some circumstances would be considered a "reasonable" sign of guilt.

Would you convict someone of murder over manslaughter because your gut told you they were guilty? The Southern US has countless cases of innocent black men hanged because they had "reasonableness", but no hard evidence.

Reasonableness is fickle. For example, in self defense cases with video (probably the most important cases concerning reasonableness), the prosecution pushes to review the video frame by frame while the defense pushes to play the video in realtime. Why? because when you see the video in realtime and make snap decisions, the defense seems more reasonable. When you pick it apart frame by frame, you have tons of time to think about all the things you might have done and can convince yourself that maybe lethal defense wasn't needed.

If reasonableness changes so much just by HOW you watch the same video, how can it really be considered reasonable? What is does reasonable actually mean in practice?

It's also worth noting that not all evidence is admitted in trials and the judge has significant ability to shape the outcome of the trial based on what evidence they "reasonably" believe should be included.

> How do you envision the legal system dealing with issues such as intent and negligence without the notion of a "reasonable person"?

I'm not proposing something radically different. I'm proposing we use reasonable doubt instead of reasonable intuition as the primary metric. You can never completely remove reasonableness, but its effect should be mitigated and controlled. If you can't prove something, you shouldn't convict based on the unprovable ideas your world view fabricates that may or may not be accurate.

No, we don't have to do that. The current system works well as it is.

> You want LOTS of laws specifying all kinds of unacceptable behaviors in great detail.

I don't have a problem with detail. Instead, I am rejecting the idea that mass amounts of details is always necessary, or that the law somehow completely collapses when it doesn't have detail.

No, the law is perfectly able to handle vague situations all the time, and you are the one trying to claim that it all falls apart for some reason. It doesn't. It works out quite well, and it worked out quite well in this case.

> You only differ from me

No, you are demanding that a completely pervasive and common concept of "reasonableness", which exists in all parts of the law be changed.

No, we don't need to do that. The law deals with that concept all the time and isn't falling apart.

Wrongful conviction rates range from 4% to nearly 16% depending on the study. That means between 1 in 25 and 1 in 6 people convicted of crimes are actually innocent. Is that what you consider a system that works well? Would you get on a plane that crashed 1 out of 25 times? Would you consider that plane to be working well?

A huge percentage of those wrongful convictions happen because there wasn't any evidence, but the police and prosecutors were "reasonable". The judge was "reasonable" and the juries were "reasonable" too. Despite the complete absence of facts to support their "reasonable" feeling, they managed to convict an astonishing number of innocent people.

If one jury is full of suspicious people who always see the worst in others and another jury is full of people who always assume the best, the idea of reasonableness says that both should reach the exact same conclusion. You of course recognize that both will convict when there is clear evidence of guilt, but only one will convict when "reasonableness" becomes an issue.

That is the point. Reasonableness only exists when there's ambiguity or missing facts and only exists to CREATE a crime where you can't PROVE a crime (if you could prove that the act was criminal, reasonableness would be unnecessary) all while saying without evidence (and with plenty evidence to the contrary) that every other person on the planet would jump to the same conclusion as you did. Or as a paradox, reasonableness exists to create unreasonable situations.

I'm not demanding that the law be changed wholesale. The only required change is that the law only charge for crimes it can prove. For almost every greater charge, there is a lesser charge with wider scope. If you cannot prove the greater charge, then only prosecute the lesser charge (and don't prosecute the greater charge and the lesser charge while hoping "reasonableness", jury cynicism against the defendant, and randomness of the jury pool gets you a conviction).

Most good prosecutors already follow this principle and remove reasonableness as much as possible. When they do not is where many/most those wrongful convictions come into play (that and the unjust practice of plea bargaining). There seems to be very little to lose except bad prosecutions and bad convictions.

Why are they using any language at all? Why not just let the app maker open the payment screen directly?

Same (perceived) reason my bank and brokerages (and I think even my kid's school website does this) pop up a warning every time I click on a link that will take them outside their website.

I think there's a valid reason to think "if it's OK and common for banks and brokers to do it, it's OK for me to do it" and also to think "this will help protect users from being scammed by other apps who might pop open random links without any notices".

There is probably nothing whatsoever the judge could have done about this action by itself. The issue is the conversations around it, which established intent. The chat logs provide hard evidence that it was done in bad faith and with criminal intent.

Now that I think about it, I wonder how much of the current backlash against remote work is to avoid this exact situation. Face to face conversations don't end up in evidence. Written conversations do, and video chats are increasingly being summarized and recorded by AI.

But in this case, it's not taking the user out of Apple's website. It's taking them out of Epic's app into Epic's website.

From a positive point of view: so that app makers can't open up malicious payment screens. Of course, I don't think there's anything stopping them now.

From a more negative point of view, so Apple knows how much it happens and gets to have some influence over it.

Because users will then blame Apple when they get scammed.

There are a lot of websites that give you a warning when you click on a link outside of their control.

But this is from a non-Apple app. You’re already on a page outside of Apples control.

I have my parents use iOS because they couldn’t help themselves from downloading malware on Android. It wasn’t from Google, but it didn’t matter, because the whole Android system’s reputation was reduced because of it.

It doesn’t matter. The app came from the App Store.

The 180-page injunction outline the reason for it and the goals of the injunction. They knew the court ruled against them for specific reasons but came up with a solution that didn't take into account any of the stated goals into account.

Their solution didn't address any of the goals of the injunction.

IANAL.

Malicious compliance is a thing. They're supposed to use neutral language.

Malicious compliance is only illegal if it doesn't actually comply.

This is also wrong.

Good faith is a requirement. Act in bad faith, and you can still be sanctioned.

Do you have any background in this, or are you just asserting what you want reality to be?

Because you are just spouting wrong information that, even for a non-lawyer, would take you 10 minutes to go find and read right information.

Non-lawyer here. This information is surprising to me (to be clear, I believe you, I just would have guessed otherwise).

Is some degree of malicious compliance not extremely common when companies deal with the courts? From the outside it seems like the incentive would be to comply with a court order to the minimum degree required to avoid further legal consequences, but no more. Is compliance more enthusiastic that that in practice? Again, I have zero experience, but the idea of a company losing a lawsuit and then actually acting in good faith is a strange one to me.

An individual might be intimidated to act in actual good faith to avoid serious consequences, but Apple as an entity can't be tossed in jail for contempt of court, right? So it would seem that it is incentivized to push it's employees to take risks like this, with the understand that they can be replaced by employees who will if they refuse.

Again, once you lose, the adversarial part is over.

Malicious compliance is exactly why good faith is a requirement but not a defense.

Bad faith will get you contempt, good faith will not save you from contempt if you didn't do enough.

Do companies try to skirt this anyway - sure. But they run the risk of a judge finding they didn't do enough, and sanctioning them anyway, even if they didn't have obvious bad faith, or heck, even if they have objectively good faith.

There are plenty of cases where judges sanctioned good faith actors who didn't do enough.

I quoted McComb in another comment (so don't want to paste it again here), but see https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/336/187/ and friends.

In the end, once you lose, if you play stupid games, you will usually win stupid prizes.

That doesn't mean people don't play, but it's almost always against their lawyers strong advice.

As for jail - you have to distinguish civil and criminal contempt. Criminal contempt can get you thrown in jail, and has different requirements.

> Is compliance more enthusiastic that that in practice?

Once a company gets burned by scary litigation, it is often very reticent about pushing the line again.

I know the current interpretation, but I also know that it's not logically sustainable.

The key here is "reasonableness", but you can't read a judge's mind, so reasonable only means what a reasonable person would infer. That is completely subjective based on an individual's implicit biases and knowledge of all surrounding circumstances.

For example, the dev team tasked with implementing this may not be familiar with the entire case, so what they consider reasonable will be different based on that. They also know much more about technology and likely have strong feelings about what is acceptable, but the judge is NOT a subject matter expert (SME) in that area. Likewise, the judge is NOT a SME on UI/UX, so the judge's interpretation of "reasonable" may well be at odds. There is also an argument that directing to these third-party sites opens 1.4B people to exploitation, so it would be reasonable to allow them access, but also to protect those users (who also aren't SMEs and often have essentially zero understanding) from potential issues by framing things appropriately. I could go on with many other qualifiers about what would be reasonable.

The judge is qualified to make rulings based on the law, but utterly unqualified to decide what the details of a reasonable implementation would be. If she were a qualified SME, she could and should have written her reasoned decision and removed the need for interpretation. If the ruling were itself reasonable and clear, there wouldn't be meaningful room for debate about reasonableness which would in turn effectively render reasonableness a mute point. As such, you can see that "reasonableness" in these kinds of cases is a crutch to protect unqualified judges making rulings they should not be making which is ironically a very unreasonable approach.

As to "good faith", who is she to dictate that you must do what she says and be happily compliant or else? After all, unhappiness will almost certainly taint all actions to a greater or lesser degree, so anything less than perfect contentment would be "bad faith" to a greater or lesser degree.

Who is the judge to single-handedly decide these people's state of mind? Has all her study of law made her an expert on what happens in other people's minds and privy to their thoughts and experiences while ridding herself of her own biases? Such a task is impossibly hard for a jury even in broad terms with lots of facts and even less possible for a single person judging the actions of many people based only on a few chat messages.

How does she ensure that every single one of those hundreds to thousands of people involved is "acting in good faith" is an impossible task and you can be assured that at least one of them at any given time isn't acting in good faith about ANYTHING. This would imply that you must ALWAYS assume that bad faith was involved.

How do you determine how much bad faith is too much? Based on outcome is the only logical answer, but in that case, you could have been explicit about the outcome in the first place and skipped all the trouble and possible excuses of misunderstanding once again rendering "bad faith" as a crutch to protect the judge from their incompetence.

She passed judgement based on the law. As long as that judgement is fulfilled to the degree specified, the state of mind of the hundreds to thousands of people involved in carrying out that judgement should not matter.

"Good faith" and "reasonableness" is a faulty and fickle metric at its best when applied to a single person by a group of peers. It is a broken and unusable metric when applied to a group or corporate entity by a single judge not an expert in the matters at hand.

Here's a great application of reasonable: your post is incredibly unreasonable.

It's a long rant that is not based in the law, the application of "reasonability" in the law, or other examples of "good faith" standards being used. It's made without any expertise or direct relevant knowledge, yet it is offered with the authority and conviction as if you understood more about the law than the judge in question. Reasonable isn't a state of mind, so when you ask things like "who is this judge to read these people's minds" it begs a million quesitons like, how can your worldview ever deal with laws that DO involve a state of mind? This isn't some huge problem in the legal world, we rely on evidence and the reasonable conclusions and inferences you can make from the evidence.

+1 to this.

In addition, one of the ironic things is that I ran engineering teams that did the equivalent of project michigan, at Google.

More than once.

The upsides (downsides?) of being an engineer/manager/lawyer.

So i even have plenty of firsthand experience dealing with exactly this situation, both on the legal side, and the engineering side.

You didn't read what I wrote and that is apparent in your response. You didn't address any of the facts and instead just blindly parroted back the equivalent of "it's true because they say it's true". If you think I'm the first person to argue that the reasonableness standard is unreasonable, you'd be mistaken.

I stated that establishing reasonableness was hard enough with a jury of peers judging just one person in a more limited scope and more facts available and a very high burden of proof. The number of cases overturned based on differing views of "reasonableness" is proof that it isn't an objective standard of anything.

> Reasonable isn't a state of mind,

How can you define reasonableness without either directly or indirectly including subjectivity? If you add subjectiveness, then it is indeed a state of mind with different subjects (minds) having different conclusions.

Reasonableness is akin to Platonic Idealism. It assumes there is some hypothetical human who represents the reasonableness of humanity, but that is unreasonable.

As a simple example, would a reasonable person allow a trans person to use the bathroom of their choice? Ask a person on the left, a person on the right, a SME, and a trans person and you are likely to get a whole spectrum of reasonableness so wide that the two extremes would be complete opposites.

Would you trust the reasonableness of an all-white Mississippi jury judging a black man in the 1800s? This shows that reasonableness is at best a bad approximation of what the majority of the people in a specific group agree about a specific topic. This has almost nothing to do with objectivity and everything to do with subjectivity and is a state of mind rather than objective truth.

> how can your worldview ever deal with laws that DO involve a state of mind?

Mens Rea is taught to have both a subjective and objective component. The entire point of "beyond reasonable doubt" is that you should have clear indicators of the crime. This is no different with Mens Rea and someone should not be convicted strictly on a subjective "they look guilty to me" basis. The standard is still "beyond reasonable doubt" which means the overwhelming evidence for Mens Rea should be objective rather than subjective ("reasonableness" is subjective).

It is better to let the guilty go free than punish the innocent. If there is not objective evidence of Mens Rea beyond reasonable doubt, then there should not be a conviction on that charge. This is the only way to reduce wrongful conviction.

> This isn't some huge problem in the legal world, we rely on evidence and the reasonable conclusions and inferences you can make from the evidence.

This is a massive problem that you paper away until some trial makes the news and it is once again shown that there is very little agreement at large about what passes as "reasonable".

While we're on the topic, would you care to explain the utter unreasonable logic and outcomes behind qualified immunity? If you'd like a very specific example, what about the one where the cop draws his gun on a non-aggressive dog not caring that a little girl is behind it. He then shoots the girl instead of the dog and is protected by SCOTUS having crafted law out of nothing because it would be argued that he acted "reasonably" (even though it would 100% be a criminal conviction were the badge removed from the equation).

I'll say again that reasonableness is almost completely unreasonable.

All of this is speaking only of criminal law where the Mens Rea is (generally) limited to a single incident by a single person. When you involve many people (most not directly involved and some potentially from different places, cultures, and legal systems) over time and what all of them consider to be reasonable would be unreasonable enough. Making a judge qualified to judge the actions of these people as reasonable or unreasonable then hold an entirely different group of people (a group almost certainly unaware and with no reasonable means of becoming aware) responsible for those actions is also unreasonable.

And of course, a judge writing up stuff she isn't a SME in is going to be seen as unreasonable by a supermajority of people. Should the burger flipper at McDonalds be writing up criteria about how brain surgery should be conducted? Would you consider his judgement about how that brain surgery was conducted to be reasonable? I think not.

>You didn't read what I wrote and that is apparent in your response.

I absolutely did read what you wrote. What I will not read is any of your response after this sentence.

I am concerned that the App Store has become the norm. For many young people, iPhones and iPads have been their only computer. Many have never seen a world where app developers can distribute independently. The NYT had an article out about ruling, and the number of people supporting the App Store was astounding.

I think Apple has done a great job marketing the App Store as the reason for the security/UX of their platform, when in reality, it's the OS. It's the OS that requires apps to get permission before accessing my location, it's the OS that isolates apps from each other, it's the OS that provides an easy way to install/uninstall packages.

The confusion between benefits of the OS/benefits of the App Store combined with many peoples' unfamiliarity with third party distribution has made it more difficult to convince people of the merit of these antitrust suits.

My brother in law (25 years old) mostly uses his phone for everything, which is obviously fine, but he needed help with something on his computer recently so he called me.

It was just asking for help getting stuff of a portable hard drive from work, so I tell him to plug it in and open up the file explorer.

He didn't know what the file explorer was, so I say "uh, the thing with the folders and shit in it, the little folder icon on the bottom". He eventually figured it out, and then I tell him to click on the drive on the left, which he figured out, and then I told him to open another file explorer window and drag the files from the first one to the second. The entire ordeal ended up taking him like ten minutes.

My brother in law isn't stupid or anything, he just didn't grow up with the typical desktop computer interface that most people who frequent HN did. He's been able to use a phone or a tablet for pretty much the entire time he's been using "computers", and those abstract away most of the lower level details.

one of my interns didn't know how to create a folder.

I'm glad my dad taught me mkdir at 9 years old.

> it's the OS. It's the OS that requires apps to get permission before accessing my location, it's the OS that isolates apps from each other, it's the OS that provides an easy way to install/uninstall packages.

Sorry, you're just wrong. Only by analyzing the apps can Apple enforce several policies that many folks think contribute to users' security.

The prohibition against dynamic code, lying about the reason that an app needs a certain permission, and all the trust and safety policies are all stuff an OS can't do.

> The prohibition against dynamic code, lying about the reason that an app needs a certain permission, and all the trust and safety policies are all stuff an OS can't do.

It _is_ something a community of people empowered to control their devices can organize and achieve, but we were stripped of this capability when a small set of private concerns unilaterally locked us out. They just told us that they were the only ones they trusted to manage security, and everyone apparently believed them. The state of personal privacy has gotten unimaginably worse since. Not even the world's largest organizations can manage to fight, much less anticipate, the world's worth of bad actors.

It's not impossible according to the laws of physics or anything, but is there a real world example of a non-profit community run repository of software similar in scale to the App Store, with similar guarantees of quality and security that the App Store provides?

If you think there are zero scam/malicious/malwares/etc apps on Play Store or App Store.

I have a mountain I would like to sell ya.

I am not agreeing with the other guy that it's OS.

But App Store is hardly more safe than the usual internet. Stuff...

The App Store is much safer than the set of all internet accessible binaries.

> Only by analyzing the apps can Apple enforce several policies

Or they could secure the runtime and quit giving developers dangerous entitlements in the first place. Make no mistake, Apple doesn't need the App Store to develop meaningful security for their users. The Mac is living proof.

Without those entitlements, they would get slammed for being anticompetitive by not allowing 3rd party devs the privilege of building the things they want to build on the platform.

Fine by me. If Apple can't develop safe APIs for themselves, they shouldn't be allowed an unfair advantage through unsafe channels. Secure the runtime, and everyone is happy and you're inherently better-defended against attackers.

> The Mac is living proof.

Is Mac as secure as iOS?

No.

The Apple Watch is more secure than an iPhone. I don't think anyone would use that as reasoning to justify the same security model on iOS or Mac though.

At some point, the diminishing returns of "muh security" do obviate positive and pro-consumer change.

I like this decision. But I also like that I can cancel all my IAP subs in the settings quickly. Maybe stripe could set up consumer accounts to do the same.

The government should require credit card companies to introduce a system for recurring billing which would let you see all your subscriptions on your credit card web site and cancel them there. For the 3.5% they charge in fees it is the least they can do.

Sure but until that happens the App Store is the next best option.

I as a consumer would like a choice in the matter. Pay 30% more for a subscription dashboard or pay 30% less and cancel from the developers website.

And under this decision, you will be still be free to only subscribe to apps that go through Apple and allow you to cancel that way

Hmm. I'm already considering switching our app to stripe only to ease billing reconciliation. Managing users who made in app purchases who want regular web access as well has been a pain.

Perhaps the added competition will encourage Apple to improve this, they haven't had any reason to make it better so far.

> when in reality, it's the OS

I disagree. Application developers have always been absolutely terrible at packaging. We see this all the time on linux, where publishers just fail to follow the packaging standard of the system, and instead develop an "installer" for their special little snowflake application. The OS cannot save you from that unless you also control distribution and can tell that publisher "you don't get to publish to my very valuable user group if you don't follow my rules".

Publishers have shown time and time again that if given a permission system, they'll just ask for every single permission under the sun, unless somebody stops them from doing that. The user sure isn't. They'll run whatever garbage installer script the publisher gives them because they want the application.

I don't like Apple's monopolistic behavior. I personally believe it would be a great service to the western world to break apart Big Tech, but the incentives that drive application development ARE broken. Apple has good reason to try and fix that with the app store, they just don't get to do it by running a monopoly.

We don’t see this on Android, where you can install apps from outside the Play Store.

Does Android have just as good a security record as iOS? I honestly don't know the answer to this question.

Currently we do not. There's been some of it on the fringes of enterprise/corporate stuff, but in the mainstream the Play store has had a de-facto monopoly for a while.

I would argue that this doesn't change my previous argument. I'm talking about how the "modern" OS experience necessitates a near-monopolistic app-store. That the OS cannot be separated from the app-store. This is also the current state of the Play store, even if google technically allows competitors. I also think their reluctant acceptance of these competitors was relatively recent, and therefore that market is still young. I would think that by the time several competing app-stores exist with their own exclusive apps, you'd have a markedly different experience on these OS's than you have today.

> They'll run whatever garbage installer script the publisher gives them because they want the application.

OK, sure. Fine. Whatever.

Fuckin learn or get wrecked.

> Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise.

The bean counters won. I guess Tim Cook does care about the bloody ROI after all.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim...

This worries me beyond anti-competitive stuff.

If Tim Cook is willing to lie and cheat for extra revenue, I can't trust that Apple is honest about their privacy commitments. Services revenue line must keep going up, and their ad business is a growth opportunity.

> I can't trust that Apple is honest about their privacy commitments

This is a funny comment for me to read. Did anyone honestly think that Apple was touting privacy as anything other than a competitive advantage for revenue maximization? They've had things like iAd, their services revenue has grown massively as hardware sales plateau, and they are nowhere near as "private" in certain countries either.

I agree, but I might phrase it a little bit differently. I recommend thinking about corporate stances as actions and interests, not moral intentions. Don’t expect a corporation to do things for moral reasons. Trust them only to the extent that their actions are in their self interest. To be fair, some organizations do have charters and interests that make them more palatable than others.

One takeaway to startups that hope to stand for something even after tremendous growth and leadership changes: you have to build governance and accountability structures into your organizational DNA if you truly want specific values to persist over the long run.

Sadly the openAI debacle has undermined faith in those kinds of structures as well.

This is probably a good thing -- faith in such structures was never justified.

Any relationship with a corporate entity is transactional in nature. A great deal of effort is often expended to manipulate us into feeling otherwise, but that is all it is.

Companies don't have feelings. They aren't conscious entities with a capacity for guilt or morality. They are, in essence, software applications designed to execute on systems composed of human employees. In a sense they are the original AI agents.

The end of that comment took me pretty quickly from "software applications?? nah" to "oh wow, y'know that's actually a pretty apt analogy"

Yes, OpenAI demonstrated one way not-for-profits can be commandeered. Altman appears to be quite astute at gaining power.

Every organizational design and structure has the potential to be subverted. Like cybersecurity, there are many tradeoffs to consider: continuity, adaptability, mission flexibility, and more. And they don’t exist in isolation. People are often going to seek influence and power one way or the other.

One more thing. Just because it is hard doesn’t mean we should work less hard on building organizations with durable values.

Therefore it's better to stay the hell away from companies who actively seek to take away your freedom.

I don't think there are any companies that care one way or the other about taking away your freedom.

Companies are revenue maximizers, period. The ones that aren't quickly get displaced by ones that are.

The simpler test is to stay away from any company that has anything to gain by taking away your freedom. THAT unfortunately is most of them.

The depressing reality in consumer tech is that anything with a CPU doesn't belong to you, doesn't work for you, and will never do more than pretend to act in your best interest.

> Companies are revenue maximizers, period.

This explanatory model explains a lot of what companies do but not all. It is a useful first approximation for many firms.

Still, the conceit of modeling an organization as a rational individual only gets you so far. It works for certain levels of analysis, I will grant. But to build more detailed predictive models, more complexity is needed. For example, organizational inertia is a thing. One would be wise to factor in some mechanism for constrained rationality and/or “irrational” deviations. CEOs often move in herds, for example.

> The ones that aren't quickly get displaced by ones that are.

Theory, meet history. But more seriously, will you lay out what you mean by quickly? And what does market data show? Has this been studied empirically? (I’m aware that it is a theoretical consequence of some particular market theories — but I don’t think successful financial modelers would make that claim without getting much more specific.)

I've been running Linux on Intel/AMD boxes for decades without any such problems.

Heard of the Intel Management Engine? https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op...

Little doubt AMD has something similar.

Isn't that all of them if they could?

iAd is stated as being built differently to how other adtech networks work.

I personally believe that Apple is able to make different (better), choices in the name of a consumer privacy, than Google will.

Android is built from the ground up to provide surveillance data to Google-controlled adtech - that's their revenue model. I don't begrudge them that, people should have choice, etc. but the revenue model is adtech first and foremost.

Apple want services revenue, they like services revenue, but historically they're a vertically integrated tech platform manufacturer whose revenue model is building better platforms consumers want.

It's true that the services model may start to compromise that - and they've definitely started to make some poor choices they might need to pull back on to protect the core platform model - but I do think we're not comparing like with like when we say that Apple is no different to any other company in this space.

> Android is built from the ground up to provide surveillance data to Google-controlled adtech

I've always read this and it seems well accepted. But I'm curious what exactly does it mean? What's Android sending to Google? Surely it's not logging what I click on apps? It's not logging what I click on my browser since the websites themselves send this info for ad purposes. So what's Android doing that let's say my Linux laptop isn't?

Edit: Answering my own question. There is a cross-app unique identifier (ignoring any privacy sandbox stuff) so developers and ad networks can get a consistent id across apps.

iAd doesn't exist anymore.

Yes but this exists - ads.apple.com

Those are App Store search ads I think

You can use Android without Google

In practical terms, you can't without switching to another company with an android variant that is just as bad.

I'm guessing the poster is referring to AOSP and custom ROMs. If so, yes, it is entirely possible, but not something I'd expect any normal human being to do.

Not all phones allow custom ROMs and most that do completely void your warranty. Doing it yourself is a complete non-starter for at least 95% of the population.

In practical terms, you can simply not log into a Google account on any Android device, including those made by Google, and Google will get less data about you than Apple does on iOS.

The key difference is user choice. An iOS user has no choice but to send their location data and app usage data to Apple. No such required privacy violations on Android.

>Did anyone honestly think that Apple was touting privacy as anything other than a competitive advantage for revenue maximization?

I think they're more willing to build out privacy enhancing features than other companies that don't rely on surveillance capitalism to make their money. "Small" things like Filevault add up.

I have no trouble believing a gay boomer from the South instinctively cares about personal privacy; he will have spent much of his early life needing to be very protective of his.

I would agree that most people with that exact background would have learned the hard way to care about privacy.

The single example that ascended to be the CEO of Apple though? That selection process would seem more relevant than any personal background.

My base assumption is that any impressions we have about Tim Cook (or any other executive of a company that size) are a carefully crafted artifact of marketing and PR. He may be a real person behind the scenes, but his (and everyone's) media persona is a fictional character he is portraying.

It feels like if you'd expect someone to be something based on their background, _and_ they profess to be that thing, then the onus is on the person disputing it to come up with the evidence contra?

> any impressions we have about Tim Cook ... is a fictional character he is portraying

The relevant ones here are that he's gay, of a certain age, and from the South, and that he heads up a company who appear to invest heavily, over a long period of time, in privacy protections -- these all feel like they'd be easy to falsify if there existed evidence to the contrary.

That is why he does service in China where the government has full access to all cloud data.

[dead]

Their privacy commitments align with their business, not their morals. They don't want an open internet primarily funded by advertising, so they make harder for advertising companies to track their users. What they want is an internet silod into apps you get from their app store, that are funded buy subscriptions and IAPs that they get a 30% cut from.

I like this comment because of its brutal honesty.

“They don’t want <bad thing> so they choose <equally bad thing good for their revenue>”

We can have both, because they cannot kill the web. We can enjoy better privacy in the OS, the open Web, and better controls for the applications that should not be a website (which is still quite a lot of them).

Then you can’t have trillion dollar monopolies with billionaire owners funding fascist regimes.

I think I can live without that, to be honest.

Similar to how Google merged with DoubleClick and threw out the whole "don't be evil" policy.

My luke-warm take is that the advertising industry is inherently evil.

> My luke-warm take is that the advertising industry is inherently evil.

Why? I like using ad-supported services, and have found some life-changing products/services via targeted ads.

The "don't be evil" thing has always surprised me. Why would a company that has decided to embrace evil want to admit that publically?

Graft versus host.

If evil is the absence of empathy, it’s capitalism in general that systematically cultivates this absence.

Apple is a for-profit business, and like most such entities, its primary concern is its bottom line. If promoting privacy aligns with that objective, so be it. However, the company does not have an inherent inclination toward acting ethically beyond what serves its business interests.

That's not universally true, at least. From https://www.macobserver.com/news/tim-cook-rejects-ncppr-poli...:

> “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind,” he said, “I don't consider the bloody ROI.” He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader.

> As evidenced by the use of “bloody” in his response—the closest thing to public profanity I've ever seen from Mr. Cook–it was clear that he was quite angry. His body language changed, his face contracted, and he spoke in rapid fire sentences compared to the usual metered and controlled way he speaks.

More broadly, I know that for-profit businesses are concerned with their bottom line, and I know businesses regularly throw other values under the bus in pursuit of profit. But I'm not sure it's possible to build a successful business (in terms of maintaining consumer trust, attracting and motivating decent employees, etc.) without some values beyond what's immediately quantifiable on the bottom line.

The point is not they lack values at any point in time, the point is they can switch them faster than you can say “capitalism”.

>“I don't consider the bloody ROI.” He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader.

...and you believed him? I'm sorry, I'm trying to be less cynical in life, but he said exactly what people - apple fans - want to hear.

Is he above lying? We were just discussing how one of the apple executives straight up lied in court.

Belief within limits, yes. At least, I can only think of a couple of possible explanations for the event:

1. Cook only cares about pursuing profits, but at a shareholder meeting where shareholders were pressuring him to pursue profits, he lied to them (and had the presence of mind and acting chops to pretend to be uncharacteristically angry about it), because he believed that the story would get reported on and Apple fans would want to hear it, and he made the calculation that that would be more beneficial to his bottom line than being honest (or at least more politically neutral) with his shareholders.

2. Cook really does believe about accessibility, environmental issues, and worker safety, and he tries (or at least likes to think that he tries) to take steps toward those causes at the expense of profits, but he's also a complex and flawed mixture of motivations and is capable of compromising his values (and/or of letting those under him compromise their values) to varying degrees in the face of financial rewards or the pressures of the capitalist system.

#2 seems more likely and is more consistent with my view of humanity in general.

#2 seems more probable to me for any given human being selected at random.

#1 seems more probable given a human being that has been selected to head one of the most valuable companies on the planet. That's his entire job -- to play a carefully crafted role for the public, the share holders and the media. He isn't paid to stand up at a shareholder meeting and let any sort of genuine feelings slip through, unless those feelings happen to be the right ones for that role at that moment.

It's also worth noting that the meeting in question was in 2104. That's over a decade ago now.

It's entirely possible that Cook was fully sincere then, but that over the subsequent 11 years, marinating in the toxic stew that is the upper echelons of American industry has eroded his principles and he is now more willing to listen to the voices pushing for money over all else (whether those voices are outside or inside his own head).

Pretty sure this is not about revenue but profit margins, since the Services line was under heavy surveillance by markets back then.

Though that's the core issue, margins on services are just too addictive for big tech. Not sure Apple can keep its recipe for success with both services and hardware.

> I can't trust that Apple is honest about their privacy commitments

Oh, no! Who would have thought? What could we possibly do other than keep shoving money into their faces?

Everybody knows that Apple's privacy commitments are a joke. Closed source software can't commit to privacy.

I mean, if Apple were ever serious there would be a way to have applications installed on iOS without having to tell Apple.

They were never serious.

I’m liking Phil more than I expected to.

Ironically, not really the shill as many would think.

The "bean counters" always win in the current state of affairs.

The pressure of the financial capitalism on the industrial capitalism is too high. Any company that produces anything is eventually forced into rent-seeking to keep delivering what has come to be expected YoY growth. C-level that won't let that happen will see the way out.

Whatever your opinion of Steve Jobs, he was a leader and would never have let things get this far. Now leadership is just mediocre and apple products look nice but are shallow nerfed computing experiences.

The one who blocked Adobe Flash and Google Voice? Steve jobs was the one to bring app store gatekeping and developer restrictions to IOS.

yes, but it didn't get so far that the government intervened.

Now Tim Apple has gotta call up Trump and remind him he donated to the inauguration fund and is getting fucked by the tariffs (and furthermore has to spend many billions to hedge against what the USA is going to need to do in Taiwan) and get him to threaten the appellate judge.

It will be interesting to see if Mr Apple has more spine than Mr Amazon, who acceded to Trump's demand not to show customers how much the tariffs were costing them.

My feeling is that these guys who showed up to the inauguration of a self-professed "dictator on day one" might be a little light on backbone, if not moral fortitude.

"It's our best moral position ever, with 110% more wealth extraction over our previous models. We know you're gonna love it."

I don’t think it has anything to do with backbone or fortitude. You can’t fight city hall.

Neither Bezos nor Cook has an army (or a CIA). Trump does. They are not playing the same game.

All private wealth, and businesses, and cash flows exist only at the pleasure of the state.

I don't know if you are joking and I think it says a lot that I can't tell.

They already are why do you think Zuckerberg etc were sucking up to Trump and complaining about trade restrictions and barriers in Europe.

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"Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anti-competitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anti-competitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover-up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple."

I'd recommend skimming through the whole thing because Judge Rogers just eviscerates Apple over and over.

“For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.”

I love whichever clerk wrote this and then got it through. The real MVP

John Gruber picks out the juiciest parts [1].

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2025/04/gonzales_rogers_apple_app...

He has such a talent for brevity: "You know a judge is pissed when she busts out the bold italics."

It's so good... but also it has taken so, so long to get here. The US should've done something about the app store tax a long time ago. People thought Apple won their case, but it... really just took time to get here. You get to try malicious compliance with judges exactly once, and then you're over.

Shoot me down with examples here, but my impression is that the US (historically, not just in the last three months) will never hurry to curtail the ability of a US company to make profit. With the possible exception of when a US company egregiously flouts laws that already exist.

Effective regulation isn't a strength of the US.

The US has no problem with regulating its industries. It just doesn't do it pre-emptively out of fear the way the EU does. It actually lets business develop before assessing any damages.

So you're arguing that it's s still to early to assess Google, Meta, Amazon and other big tech? Somehow I don't think that's right and EU realized the need of regulation much earlier.

Not arguing that it's still too soon. The anti-trust litagations are obviously underway. But the EU themselves only started cracking down within the last decade, which is still relatively recent.

The problem is the damage was obvious in 2014, and it took until 2025 for us to do anything about it. In the tech cycle, that reaction time is way, way too slow. Honestly, the biggest part of the problem is not when they started investigating, it's how long they allowed these companies to abuse the process.

This case started in 2020. What companies like Apple and Google have done in most of these cases has been to abuse the court's willingness to provide extensions to create an incredible amount of delay. One of the tactics they use both here and in the EU is to say they need more time, and more time, and more time, and then on the very last day of the last extension just say "nah, we don't think we're doing anything wrong". They didn't need the extensions, they were just wasting time. Because the amount of money they make on the status quo is worth drawing out as long as possible.

If anything, I think the biggest reform would be to say that large companies do not get to ask for extensions on court deadlines. They have literally billions of dollars, hundreds of lawyers, there is no reason they cannot manage to get what they need to do done on schedule. Asking for more time should be viewed as bad faith.

> and then you're over What does this mean in practice?

Apple is still doing business, has three years of profits from the malicious compliance, and appears to have attracted not much more than a sternly worded letter from a judge, and possible criminal contempt charges for a couple of individuals.

What real world consequences does Apple face for this behavior?

> As always, the cover-up made it worse

Can someone explain this to me? As far as I understand apple is being ordered to do the thing it was supposed to do already. Are there extra consequences I've not understood related to them disregarding the court ruling?

They are being ordered to pay the court and Epic’s costs and being referred to the Department of Justice for potential criminal prosecution for contempt.

Link?

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25924283/epic-v-apple...

There will be a fine. Nobody will go to jail. Apple will appeal. They will likely prevail on this "steering" complaint on a freedom of speech basis. It is their platform afterall.

My concern is more about having private companies control platforms upon which we depend. I do often wish that I had a crystal ball to peer a decade or several into the future to see what the future holds for humanity in this regard. Our legal system seems ill-equipped to manage this risk.

The far bigger question is about the 27% fee on purchases made outside the apple ecosystem. If this ruling is upheld that revenue stream is gone

Their entire setup was egregious.

They charge 27% for purchases made using external payment processors. Including Stripe fees that's net-zero (not even accounting for any chargeback risks). They severely limit how you can display the external purchase link too, and display an obnoxious warning screen when you tap it.

I would be surprised if a single developer adopted it.

https://developer.apple.com/support/storekit-external-entitl...

From the court document, I don't know how many ended up actually adopting it, but it's about what you'd expect:

> As of the May 2024 hearing, only 34 developers out of the approximately 136,000 total developers on the App Store applied for the program, and seventeen of those developers had not offered in-app purchases in the first place. In May 2024, Apple argued that it would take more time for developers to take advantage of the Link Entitlement and that the adoption rates could not be known. Apple attempted here to mislead.

> Given the revelations of the February 2025 hearing, Apple modeled the lack of adoption. That Apple adduced no testimony or evidence indicating developer adoption of the program is no surprise. As shown above, Apple knew it was choosing a course which would fail to stimulate any meaningful competition to Apple’s IAP and thereby maintain its revenue stream

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...

This seems like a strange argument to me.

Apple is not just responsible for making it possible to purchase apps outside the App Store, but to convince developers to use it over the App Store as well?

I suppose it's damning when combined with the internal emails demonstrating they were trying to avoid compliance with the ruling?

Yes, internal emails and other documents demonstrate that they carefully weighed every single decision (fee rate, restrictions on verbiage, style, placement, and other policies) with the express purpose of ensuring that IAP competition wouldn't be economically viable while trying to appear to be in compliance.

> To summarize, this Court’s orders required that Apple not impose restrictions in its iOS marketplace which would prohibit consumer access to and awareness of competitive alternatives to IAP. The Injunction specifically enjoined Apple’s anti-steering provisions which at the time prohibited developers from raising that consumer awareness and access. In response, Apple intentionally devised a compliance scheme to prevent developers from deploying competitive alternatives to IAP. Apple’s discounted commission rate, on its own, forecloses a developer’s use of link-out purchases. Adding to that, Apple’s various design restrictions and purchase-flow friction arbitrarily decrease the attractiveness of competitive alternatives (if they were utilized) and increase breakage in a purchase flow.

> Apple’s conduct violates the Injunction. The non-compliance was far from “technical or de minimis.” Apple’s lack of adequate justification, knowledge of the economic non-viability of its compliance program, motive to protect its illegal revenue stream and institute a new de facto anticompetitive structure, and then create a reverse-engineered justification to proffer to the Court cannot, in any universe, real or virtual, be viewed as product of good faith or a reasonable interpretation of the Court’s orders.

Only one I'm aware of is Delta Emulator by Riley Testut [1].

[1]: https://www.macstories.net/news/an-app-store-first-delta-add...

Wasn’t there a recent EU fine for Apple for preventing developers from promoting alternative distribution channels within their apps, or linking to external subscription websites?

Half of the entire HN was like „EU bad, how dare you regulate them”. What gives?

This is more about Apple lying under oath about both delaying the court and being aware what they were doing was not actually complying with the previous order. Additional factors are it does not list a fine, relies on longstanding general anti-trust legislation rather than new tech specific laws, and there isn't a wide swath of other regulatory rulings against Apple coinciding with the previous one.

Between all of this, it'll be a lot harder to come to the comments to defend Apple for not getting fined twice in a row for the same issue despite lying under oath and intentionally delaying proceedings, even if you vehemently disagree with the original ruling.

Google tends to be the one with more sympathy in the US lately as they've gotten much more of the regulatory stick in court.

HN is mostly US audience.

EU = bad

US = good

But weren't people here supposed to be intellectually curious, and have the cognitive tools to overcome things like instinctive tribalism?

Intellectually curious doesn't necessarily overrule base human tendencies.

They may be more likely to have the capacity, but no way it's amy kind of guarantee.

That's a curiously limited form of curiosity, if it doesn't even examine the base tendencies of the operating human.

Individual human behaviour is full of little seeming hypocrisies and counter intuitiveness when looked at from the outside. There's usually some explanation that makes sense to the individual themselves or a blind spot they're in denial about or don't realise they have.

A lot of human behaviour is learned and becomes habitualised rather than logically thought through. Habits are sub-conscious and therefore logic doesn't (as) often get applied.

I think you'll find at least 1/4 of HN comments are indicative of stating things from a place of strong instinctive tribalism, but this crowd are just very slightly better at using words to defend our position in a more noble way.

That's OK, it shows we're human, it's not all AI slop here (yet?).

I guess being smart sometimes doesn’t lead you to have a more accurate opinion, but to develop more sophisticated rhetorical devices to defend your inaccurate opinion?

Oh man, just wait until you see the research on fMRI timing on when decision making vs rationalization parts of the brain engage.

Hint: rationalization tends to be after.

Not to say that it can’t be overridden with training and/or self-reflection/self-skepticism, but first reactions tend to allows follow this pattern.

I'm aware of that, but opinions aren't quick decisions, they form over time, so that might be a different mechanism at work.

Edit: hmm, I suppose voicing your hot take about a news piece is a quick decision though.

Yeah. I’ve been steadily figuring out why the ‘strong, silent type’ used to be 1) so much more common, and 2) hated by a certain type of personality, and 3) might be a better approach than anyone wants to think about.

In my subjective opinion, when it comes to Apple specifically, all kinds of unpaid labor will emerge from the ether to defend them on anonymous or pseudonymous message boards.

[flagged]

I’d refer you back to the statement of a primarily US based audience.

"Intellectually curious" on hn is either the soft glove on the fist of moderation or a thought terminating mallet against opposing views.

Seems to depend on time of day

timezones probably, EU is more likely to be on HN at different times to US

This is certainly the case. I have noticed this in voting patterns as well. I often comment strongly in favor of EU regulations (I believe capitalism is fairer and benefits consumers more with stronger regulations). During times the US is asleep such comments often get a lot of upvotes. During times where EU and the US are up, there seems to be much more contention in the voting, with votes swinging up and down a lot.

By the way, I don't think this is a good way of voting. IMO comments should be upvoted if they provide good insights (even if you disagree with them) and downvoted when they are low-content/trolling/full of fallacies.

I regularly have posts that go from say +10 in the evening to -5 in the morning (I post from the EU). I mostly agree with your observations. That said,

> IMO comments should be upvoted if they provide good insights (even if you disagree with them) and downvoted when they are low-content/trolling/full of fallacies.

Votes are not a popularity contest. Only you see your score, and it does not matter one bit whether you have 2 or 20 upvotes on a post. Even moderate negative scores don’t matter. The grey threshold is more important, and you have to post something quite bad to end up there. I think I read a good post that was dead once.

The system is working and the end result is what you want. Sure, it could be better, but we are never going to get a perfect implementation because humans are social animals, and not always very rational.

I have noticed this trend, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_identity#Brands_and_c...

Quite the opposite. Every single comment that I have done critisizing any aspect of EU regulation has been heavily downvoted. Never even seen a EU bad comment as top comment in any story.

Many people blame the EU for targeting US companies when it passes anti-monopoly and pro-consumer laws, or penalizes the companies for breaking them.

Now that US courts are doing it more, it seems that corporations abusing their monopoly powers are the problem, not EU laws. But what do I know.

> Many people

I doubt it's very many, they just are very loud because there is a lot of money behind their complaints.

You're right, we can't really know. But on HN, there are always a few comments to that effect whenever there's a larger discussion about EU consumer protections and anti-monopoly laws or penalties.

What % of the public holds these opinions? Who knows? Maybe someone will conduct a study one day, but 99.9% of internet opinions don't get studied, and 99.9% of people don't post mainly responsibly verified information.

There is so much to say about this, when most of our socialization has moved online. So much to be said.

Apols for the tangent.

I don't really know this issue, I don't study it. But from afar:

>An EU law stiffles all companies, not just the trillion dollar companies. I've essentially not considered EU audiences because I'm small and focus on the engineering + product directed toward 'everyone except Europe' because it feels like near anarchy.

>This is precision work. These companies get too big and anger the wrong person, so they get knocked. However, we obviously see that when its so big, these violations last significantly longer and often can go unpunished.

> An EU law stiffles all companies, not just the trillion dollar companies

The arguments from Americans against the recent EU regulation is usually the opposite - that it is laser targeted at large US companies "because the EU is jealous that they don't have any large tech companies of their own and just want to cash in on fines"

> An EU law stiffles all companies > it feels like near anarchy

These two... really don't work together, unless my idea of what the word 'anarchy' means is different.

Anyway, an EU based company that wants to trade in the US also has its own slew of legality to consider, including dealing with work visas when visiting, state vs federal laws, import taxes, etc. [0] is the tip of the iceberg. A lot of tech companies will just "move" to the US in order to make things easier (just like a lot of US companies move to e.g. Ireland)

[0] https://www.kvk.nl/en/international/doing-business-with-the-...

>An EU law stiffles all companies, not just the trillion dollar companies. I

That is true of some EU laws. Many have a disproportionate impact on smaller companies. GDPR for example, and the early versions of VATMOSS in terms of things I have dealt with.

Also, non EU laws such as the UK's Online Safety Act.

Not just in technology. It is also true of UK licensing laws for pubs - an example my attention was drawn to by comments made by the SEO of a big pub company as giving it an advantage.

On the other hand the EU's DMA and a lot of competition regulation gets that right.

This tends to be a property of regulations in general. It costs money to comply. At a minimum you often need to hire an expert that actually understands the regulation and can explain how to comply with it.

In general that cost doesn't scale linearly with size, so bigger companies are proportionally less impacted.

Sometimes an attempt is made to compensate for this by exempting organizations under a certain size criteria.

Yes, it is a frequent problem, but efforts should be made to limit it.

It is a factor that should be considered when designing regulations. The comment with regard to the pubs was that the regulatory paperwork was a major cause for businesses being put up for sale.

There are many regulations that should exempt businesses under a certain size or with other criteria. For example small businesses that do not trade data should be largely exempt from GDPR. Small not for profits even more so.

Similarly, with VATMOSS the initial sales limit for registration was set ludicrously low.

Underlying this is a political failure to understand or even consider impacts on small businesses. When politicians talk to business they inevitably talk to big businesses.

>An EU law stiffles all companies, not just the trillion dollar companies. I've essentially not considered EU audiences because I'm small and focus on the engineering + product directed toward 'everyone except Europe' because it feels like near anarchy.

The DMA specifically only applies to platforms with more than 45 million active users.

It’s a shame Phil Schiller has gotten sidelined. He always seemed like a good guy and a big part of the “soul” of Apple as it made its resurgence under Jobs after the NeXT merger.

Agree with this. He originally was taking the opinion that they should make changes to the App Store rules from a position of strength before being forced into it. Schiller has always felt like the best embodiment of the Steve Era. I think they would have lost Tim Cook if he didn't get the CEO position, but Apple has been a little too focused on extracting as much value as possible during his time. They are still doing great stuff, but feel focused on the wrong things.

Phil Schiller was one of the strongest voices against cross-platform messaging interoperability. He's just as bad as the rest of them.

But isn’t that orthogonal to this topic? Being strong on not allowing or losing to competition from a business standpoint vs. advocating that it’s a good idea to follow the judicial directives without playing around?

He was an advocate for illegal anti-competitive business behavior.

How do I know it was probably illegal? Because Apple finally caved and implemented RCS once it started leaking through backchannels that a legal case was being built against them.

You can’t guarantee E2E across messaging networks. Apple still doesn’t do it, and neither does Signal, WhatsApp, Messenger, etc.

Sure you can. The services just need to agree protocols. The tech & cryptography part is not difficult these days. We've had guaranteed E2E for email since PGP in 1991, though not many people cared enough to use it.

None of the services you listed do it, but that's because they don't want to, not because it can't be done. It's a business decision problem, not a technical problem.

> RCS update adds end-to-end encryption, Google and Apple confirm support

https://9to5google.com/2025/03/14/rcs-end-to-end-encryption-...

The parent is technically wrong, but he was right at the time the decision got made.

The parent is factually correct about the state of the world at time the decision was made but it is irrelevant trivia, given that Apple already supported SMS (an unencrypted protocol) and that they made a deliberate business decision to preserve the status quo of non-interoperability and their ability to falsely blame it on a dedication to encryption.

In what sense, that we literally didn't know how to do e2e across messaging networks? The Signal protocol existed in 2016 when Schiller argued against cross-platform (also PGP for 30+ years). Even granting that, offering iMessage on Android would satisfy most people and doesn't require operating across networks so any argument about feasibility rings very hollow.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406303/imessage-android...

There's a whole class of sh*t-software that only exists (and is profitable) because users subscribe to them and then forget – primarily because the subscription fee is charged as "Apple" on their Credit Card. I wonder what's gonna happen with this type of scam.

If through Apple it is easy to cancel and all subs are listed in one place.

If done through third parties directly the scammers will not make unsubscribing easy and it will not be as easy to find out where you are subscribing.

Thus I expect the scamming to increase.

Easy from your point of view... This is the argument I mostly hear from Apple folks, but my experience (especially with less tech savvy folks) is that they have no idea where or how to cancel a subscription on IAP and they think that the multiple "Apple" charges are just some iCloud thing or something along those lines. With Credit Card flows the alarm bells go off waaaay earlier: when a website asks for their CC data, they immediately scrutinize more (and thus, conversion rates are lower)

There’s a single page in the settings with all the subscriptions, and you can cancel any of them by tapping a button and confirming. You get emails regularly with a link to a page with the subscription information when it is renewed. It really is easy and much, much better than all the alternatives I tried.

I wanted to cancel an Apple subscription recently. I didn't know where to do it. I knew it was coming up because I got an email from Apple to say it was shortly due for renewal.

It took me about 5 seconds to google "cancel subscription apple" and find about a zillion articles on how to do it. Basically open up the App Store, go to your account, click on subscriptions, click on the one in the list you want to cancel. Done.

On the other hand, I also wanted to cancel a pet-locator subscription that was coming up for renewal (we're leaving the country, they don't have coverage outside the US) and I had to go through about 30 layers of "are you sure", "are you really sure", "you know this will stop your service, right?", "we'd sure hate to lose you", "Is there anything we can offer to change your mind", etc. etc.

> I got an email from Apple to say it was shortly due for renewal.

There was a link in that email to a page to manage and cancel that subscription, although it might not be obvious.

Apple also, I think by default, send out emails just before a subscription is due telling you how to unsubscribe.

I doubt a scammer will do that.

Apple users as NPCs confirmed

It’s not easy on iOS either.

For me to get to it from App Store, I have to click a tiny profile pic (smallest allowed button on iOS?)

The next screen displays Purchase History and other items. However, no way to cancel from this page (insane?)

To get to subscriptions, I have to click my name at the top of that page (which doesn’t even look like a button) which loads for 3 seconds then pops up.

On this hidden account page, it shows Purchase History along with subscriptions list to cancel.

If any other site hid subscription cancelling behind a flat contact header secret account page, it’d be an issue, so yeah it’s an issue for Apple too.

Getting there via the App Store is just one option. You can also get there from Settings under Apple Account > Subscriptions.

And if that’s too tricky, you can just type “Subscriptions” (shows up after just typing “sub” for me) into Spotlight Search, and it’s the top option.

What version are you using? Click 'Settings' -> 'Profile' (huge button on top) -> 'Subscriptions'. I don't know how it could be easier than that. Ah wait, pull down on the home screen for search, type 'subscriptions' and tap on the result for direct access to the setting. From there you can see and cancel any subscription made in the App Store.

> If done through third parties directly the scammers will not make unsubscribing easy and it will not be as easy to find out where you are subscribing.

This is fairly quickly resolved though - if anything close to 1% of customers complain to their banks that they don't want this payment and can't cancel it, triggering a chargeback, the scammers end up entirely blocked from the payment networks entirely in pretty short order. If you end up banned from Visa & Mastercard your whole operation is permanently kaput.

Also, this might be a non-US thing, but over here most modern banks (e.g. Revolut) will let you view & block recurring payment authorizations directly from your banking app anyway.

Nothing? The ruling is that app developers get to choose how they communicate to users, or how they charge in-app fees. The kind of shady developers you describe would simply continue to use Apple, as it benefits them to do so.

Right now, yes, but there's a potential to:

- Most legit services move to a web based Apple Pay (note to the unaware reader: this is NOT In-App Purchases and has never had 30% fees) due to the ease of implementing and lower fee (easier to do cross platform + web) - Non-legit developers keep the In-App flow

Over time this would skew In-App Purchases to be scammy-only (and therefore, easier to spot). I'm sure people at Apple consider this possibility too – and therefore, now that there's actual competition, IAP flows will probably have to change to prevent this and compete for actual developer preference (and keep it a viable legit-developer choice)

So they should probably just scrap the 30% fee. At the very least scrap it if the user was linked directly to the app. And just make the also huge commission on the payments.

Apple sends a specific, detailed receipt on the billing of every such item. Apple has some of the most user-friendly subscription management options of anyone. Apple lets you cancel a subscription immediately without cancelling the service immediately, and so on.

There is a lot to criticize Apple for -- the 30% fee is disgusting, and the subject of this order where they bar external payments without fees is criminal -- but the subscription complaint has always been weak.

About time. I'm tired of apologizing to customers who purchase subscriptions in my app only to discover they could have purchased the exact the same thing from my website for 15% less. "Why didn't you tell me?"

Excerpt from the filing:

"In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate."

About time for what? Another company to get charged with something that they don't get punished for?

The fines are always less than the companies' net gains from the practice. Gains are often indirect, risk-related, and/or part of a larger strategy, so they cannot be calculated.

Everything short of prison is a waste of time, waste of tax dollars, and spits in the face of decent citizens.

The judge referred the case for review of contempt of court, which makes individuals responsible for their criminal actions, and carries possible prison sentences. The judge has clear evidence of lying under oath and withholding evidence, and people have gone to prison for less. Alex Roman appears primarily culpable, but given the evidence reported, Tim Cook may also be complicit, and others. There is a real chance they are arrested at some point.

For me (IANAL), reading the judgment was initially shocking primarily for its facts and tone, rather than having any understanding of the legal consequences. I initially skipped over the phrase 'contempt of court' because the phrase seems so familiar from TV. But on reflection, it's the most consequential part of the document because, as you say, it has actual consequences for the people involved.

>There is a real chance they are arrested at some point.

Let's put money on it. I'll put $10k on it.

Lying under oath would catch a perjury charge as well.

In the United States, the general perjury statute under federal law classifies perjury as a felony and provides for a prison sentence of up to five years.

I like the idea of civil judgements that require responsible individuals to remove themselves from the company. And void any forward looking renumeration in their contracts.

Personal fines too, such as returning past remunerations during the problematic time in question. Salaries. Stock grants.

There is no such thing as an incentive, that doesn't incentivize someone. Relatively small fines relative to revenues and profits don't incentivize anything.

Alternatively, if fines really were big enough to turn large companies around (i.e. not just the enforced, but other companies seeing the enforcement), heads would roll, but would they be the right ones given those in charge are unlikely to fire themselves? And shareholders are the ones really paying the fines, are they really the culprits?

The incentives to act in good faith, should be placed very directly on the individuals whose choices dictate the good/bad faith. Starting and staying largely with the CEO, and the direct line of reports from the CEO down to the relevent decisions.

You don't want anyone who mattered to have cover. You want CEO's policing their own, and their reports pushing back upward against poor directives.

The only cover for relevent actors would be a record of pushing back against those who pushed through poor behavior.

TLDR: Limited liability should protect non-managing shareholders, but not bad actors within a company. Decisions makers should always be held directly responsible for their decisions. Any other system is perverse.

I think both things are needed. Despite what you're saying, shareholders have the ultimate responsibility and control over the company: they own it, they name the executives, and all the profits are ultimately returned to them. So it's absolutely necessary for the shareholders to be penalized, massively, if they profitted massively off of illegal business practices. Even if the executives were hiding this illegality from them, they are still responsible for having set up the company in a way that allowed that.

If you only punish the executives for illegal business practices, but leave the company alone, then you create an incentive to hire patsies as executives, continue letting them do illegal stuff, go to jail, and pay them handsomely after they get out.

Ultimately it has to be the company that's losing money when the company made money from illegal business, otherwise the company can just find other people willing to continue and provide for everyone who gets caught.

> Ultimately it has to be the company that's losing money when the company made money from illegal business, otherwise the company can just find other people willing to continue and provide for everyone who gets caught.

You are so right. The board & shareholders are in the path of responsibility and not recognizing that would be a call for both to use and abuse executives as scapegoats.

So be it!

> I like the idea of civil judgements that require responsible individuals to remove themselves from the company.

As long as their job isn't to P.L.E.A.S.E.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfWVV533RHE&t=85s

> There is no such thing as an incentive, that doesn't incentivize someone.

It's wild how the public discourse on incentives is so split. On one hand, the poor are guilty until proven innocent of six dimensional chess to eek "unearned" pennies from social programs, yet the very idea that mega billionaires might pull easy, obvious levers for unethical mega million payouts is one that must beg and scrape for consideration.

100%. This doesn't deserve a fine. This deserves Apple to be given an ultimatum about their mob boss behavior with mobile.

Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax. You can't even deploy your own apps at your own cadence, without strict review, using your own technology. You have to jump through unplanned upgrade cycles, you're forced to use their payment rails and signup flows (and don't get to know your customer or get them to use your website). You pay the taxes on everything. And even then, they let your competitors advertise against your name or trademark.

This is rotten to the core.

Neither Google nor Apple should have an app store. Apps should be web installs. The only reason things work the way they do is so that Apple and Google can tax and exert control. A permissions system, signature scans, and heuristics are all that are needed to keep web installs safe - and all of those pieces are already in place. There's no technical or safety limitation, Apple and Google just want to dominate.

These two companies were innovative 20 years ago, but their lead then doesn't entitle them to keep owning the majority of most people's computing surface area for the rest of time. They have to give up the reigns. There are still billions of dollars for them to make on mobile, even if regulators tell them to stop treating developers as serfs and locking them in cages.

No. More. App. Stores.

Regulate big tech's hold over mobile, web, search, and advertising.

I understand people like this ruling and want Apple and Google to open up. But this is just silly rewriting of history:

> Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax.

Long before Apple and Google made phones, a huge mobile device ecosystem already existed, including app stores, and it was way more locked down and expensive than what we have now.

The iPhone did not even launch with an app store, its launch concept was 100% web apps. They only added the native SDK and app store after developers and customers demanded it.

Again: I know the world is different now. But the idea that this was all some swift inexorable coup by Apple and Google is totally inaccurate. Plenty of other companies had a chance to do things differently, many with huge head starts.

Sure, but parallel to the mobile device (featurephone) ecosystem, there was also the old smartphone ecosystem which grew out of the PDA market where you could install your own program without paying the middleman. I would argue that modern day smartphone is more similar to the old smartphones than the featurephones.

And somehow despite that ecosystem existing before, new entrants Apple and Google emerged victorious. Maybe it had something to do with their different approach.

I doubt it was because people wanted The App Store. If the PocketPC/Windows Mobile had an App Store it would not have won.

Featurephones had App Stores like Verizon’s “Get It Now” and it was obvious that they were money grabs like Apple’s.

Apple and Google won the game because the phones were powerful enough to make web browsing feasible, and had great text input.

If nobody had thought of app stores, it would have been trivial to distribute .ipa’s and .apk’s on the Web just like Windows and Mac software still predominantly is.

> Long before Apple and Google made phones, a huge mobile device ecosystem already existed, including app stores, and it was way more locked down and expensive than what we have now.

That’s a poor comparison IMO, because the scale of this was multiple orders of magnitude less. App stores were a niche occurrence that almost no nontechnical person had heard about. Seldom anyone „needed“ an app for their company to be successful. Now they control billions of eyes.

In addition there are some exceptions when it comes to new stuff which app stores were at the time. When you come up with something new e.g. you can choose who to make business with. Different to what you can do running a dominant platform.

The iPhone did not even launch with an app store, its launch concept was 100% web apps.

In 2007 web apps were severely limited in performance and functionality, so this wasn't remotely feasible for most apps. I still believe Apple's original plan was a console model where hand-picked partners would get the secret native API. Then they realized the demand for native apps was much greater than they had anticipated, and decided to take a 30% cut from millions of developers rather than large licensing fees from a few.

> They only added the native SDK and app store after developers and customers demanded it.

People demanded native SDK because web apps were garbage, unlike the native first party apps. Some people wanted an app store. No one ever wanted or demanded an exclusive app store. Putting demand for native SDK and demand for app store in one sentence smells like gaslighting.

Sure, 100% web apps will never work. It should be 95% web apps.

These days that’s obviously true. Back then web technologies lacked a lot but today I seriously question why say, a retailer, needs to waste the massive cost of building an app and putting it on both of the App Stores and updating it for every OS change. Especially considering it’s just going to be using React Native and likely isn’t any faster or more responsive than the Web.

And as a user it just feels idiotic to have to download a dedicated program to say, pay for parking or order a sandwich, in a city I’m just visiting for the day. As though taking a credit card on the Web is a foreign concept.

It's worth noting that other fields take a radically different perspective on this. You can see Brandon Sanderson talking about how software developers get such great deals from publishers, with Apple, Google, and Steam taking puny 30% commissions, and he wishes authors could get something similar.

The 30% number was taken very positively when the Apple app store launched. It was much lower than what software companies typically budgeted at that time for marketing and distributing a new product.

Of course it didn’t take long before the App Store was so full that anyone who wanted scale had to do additional paid marketing anyway.

It's also insane how what was considered dystopia for desktop computing silently happened for mobile devices: a corporation controlling the software stack and using cryptography against the users to control precisely what software they are allowed to run on their "own" devices. Yes, in principle Android phones can be rooted, but in practice this breaks Play Integrity and you are now locked out from a huge range of apps.

Google and Apple have silently achieved Microsoft's wet dream from the "trusted platform" era of effectively making it impossible for free and open source operating systems to compete with their own.

You don't need to root an android to install apps from outside the play store

What I meant is if I want to run an open source OS like LineageOS. In principle this is possible, but Play Integrity will refuse to work when you have a custom ROM.

It does deserve a fine and/or criminal forfeiture of the revenue they made from the app store monopoly. If Apple had to repay let's say the difference between what they charged and what a reasonable fee would be (let's say 10%), for the entire time they've been doing it, that would put "a bit" of a dent into their pocketbook and serve as an effective deterrent.

I'm fine with Google and Apple having App stores, so long as I'm not forced to use them. They should compete like everyone else. The walls of the walled garden have to be torn down. They still get to have a garden, they just can't lock unwitting people inside of it.

Walls to keep apps out should be fine, but they should have to have gates to let the consumers out - i.e. a method to install other apps (not through the app store) that have every bit the same level of access as the device manufacturer's apps.

There should be two levers used to achieve this. One is anti-trust style legislation. The other is patent misuse legislation. If you try and prevent consumers from running software on hardware they bought from you to make a profit, you shouldn't be allowed to prevent consumers from buying the same hardware from someone else - that's what patents do - they create government enforced monopolies on the hardware. You should be required to invalidate (donate to the public domain) every patent on the hardware if you want to sell hardware where you get to profit off your monopoly on letting developers write software for the hardware.

These Epic rulings are better than nothing, but I can't help but feel that their solution of "make Apple distribute software they don't like in their app store" is the wrong one.

A company can lock the hardware but not the software, or lock the software but not the hardware? I’ve not heard this idea before, it sounds like an extremely logical idea. It would easily be achieved by splitting apple in two. I wonder if there are any downsides to that? The “walled garden” of hardware and software does have some benefits, but the cost to society is too high.

Is anyone proposing making Apple distribute software? If so, though, pretty sure just allowing sideloading instead would satisfy all of Apple’s critics including the government. It’s Apple who insists that all roads onto the iPhone must go through them (and give them 30% of your gross revenue)

> Is anyone proposing making Apple distribute software?

That's what the plain language of this injunction does.

Admittedly if Apple had come to the court (or even potentially came to the court now) and agreed to the alternate solution of allowing sideloading the court might have issued a different injunction (or modify this injunction).

If it's good enough for Mac, it's good enough for iPhone.

I think the realistic possible end-states are either effectively Facebook controls the app store that matters or Apple/Google do.

That's not the end-state that was achieved on macs, why would it be on the one achieved on iPads or iPhones?

Its not possible for them to make "billions of dollars" any other way - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_economy

Then maybe they shouldn't be making billions of dollars

And really we don't need them making billions of dollars. It is not conducive to healthy human society or progress. Such money could be spent way better than lining the pockets of management levels, people, who enable this by not having a conscience, and corrupt politicians.

If it's possible to prove that they could only make their billions thanks to this illegal practice, that would be awesome - the government could claw back the billions.

> To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath

Well that sounds rather damning.

Happens more than you’d think. Happened to me in the past as well in some business conflict. It was baffling how people can just lie in court under oath and get away with it.

The asterisk is that the government has to be able to prove knowledge and intent to lie, and prove that beyond a reasonable doubt. It makes it really hard to successfully charge anybody with perjury.

What happened to the people who lied under oath? Were they found out?

No, it was their CFO who denied knowing about <something> when he absolutely did. We ended up winning the lawsuit on all accounts, but they were never specifically called out about lying about this.

Surely he should receive a prison sentence for that alone?

With the referral to the US attorney’s office, he actually might.

Consider how painful that is going to be for Apple, and Roman, with how the current administration is abusing the DOJ.

The repercussions of this could be huge.

Well in this case it wouldn’t be abuse. I hope they do convict him if he’s guilty of perjury. It will set an example for the other weasels. “Percentage of executives of Fortune 500 companies who do time for real crimes they committed” should be a big KPI for the DOJ in my book.

I really hope you're right, but I think we're more likely to see the case swept under the rug in exchange for totally voluntary donations from Apple to various organisations with 'Trump' in their name.

Criminal contempt would the charge against the company or the people named above? How does it work in this case?

"Accordingly ... the Court refers the issue to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California ... for investigation against Apple and Alex Roman, Apple’s Vice President of Finance specifically."

Read Taibbi's book, The Divide. No prison time is the most likely outcome unless the justice system has changed between then and now.

So what is the punishment for outright lying under oath?

Generally none, the DA must choose to pursue perjury charges, which basically never happens. In reality, nearly everyone commits perjury. Thomas More would not approve. Both versions (1966 and 1988) of A Man For All Seasons are highly worth watching several times and practically memorizing. "Would you benefit England by populating her with liars?" [edit] in retrospect, there is one inescapable consequence of lying under oath: your word now means nothing to honest people.

I bet if a poor person struggling to hold down three jobs to survive were found to be lying under oath, the DA would throw the book at them.

> if a poor person struggling to hold down three jobs to survive were found to be lying under oath, the DA would throw the book at them

Have you been to a traffic court?

Yeah. I was pulled over and told I had an "invalid" license. "My license isn't suspended!" "No, it's not, it's just invalid." Not expired. Not counterfeit. Just invalid. "What does that mean?" "You'll have ask the DOL. And here's a ticket. And you can't drive from here."

Go home, go to the DOL's website. Green text, "VALID". Weird. "Pay any monies owing on your license." Let's try that. "There are no monies owed."

Huh.

Print these out, take them to the DOL. It was a technicality where a process had suspended my license over a fine, but then unsuspended it the same day because they'd received a check.

She waives the $25 fee that should have been attached. And stamps the screenshots of this I'd taken, and prints out the status changes on my account.

Take it to court to challenge the ticket. Prosecutor doesn't want to dismiss. "They'd have generated and sent you a letter when they did that, so you had to have known."

Eventually dismissed, but only after three or four back-and-forths.

That’s hilarious. But also irrelevant. The point is people in traffic court are constantly lying. Like, zero-effort four-IQ lies.

Federal prosecutors have insanely high "winning" percentages but the closer you get to the local level, the more that drops. I suspect that local prosecutors, in addition to often having a poor understanding of the law, often try to up their win percentage by pushing cases like yours because they know most people will find it easier to just pay whatever token amount it takes to make it go away.

To be honest companies practically incentivize having no moral compass and lying to succeed. Every major company's executives incorporate lying judiciously to their employees and their users alike and encourage their reports to lie to theirs and so on. Adhering to complete honesty is a one way ticket to HR.

Sit on any all-hands call for a major company and it is practically guaranteed large chunks of the presentation will be executive gaslighting of its own employees with info that is objectively false or a misrepresentation. You will also never get a real answer to actual hard questions (especially if it is on the topic of something that may negatively affect workers) which is essentially lying by omission.

It doesn't help that we have now proven that you can lie all the way to the seat of being president of the united states.

That said - whether we like it or not, we are now a culture built on lying.

This matches my own personal experience of corporate America, and is one of the primary reasons I left.

And it’s not just the lying that’s the problem - it’s the lack of critical thinking, the gullibility, the willingness to suspend disbelief and give benefit of the doubt and credit where it’s not due, amongst those being lied to, be they employees, or voters.

The way out is to see through it, to question it, and to stop acquiescing to it. If we all do that, the liars will never ascend to the positions of power we have allowed them to have over us today.

> we are now a culture built on lying.

Are now? I mentioned Thomas More to show that this exact same thing happened 500 years ago. The whole point of the movie A Man For All Seasons is to show that this is always how it has been throughout human history, and that only a few people stand out as putting the truth higher than their own interests, such as Thomas More and Joan of Arc, which deeply impress even non-religious people like Robert Bolt and Mark Twain.

Maybe 'are now' was the wrong choice of words because this is correct. It has always been this way.

Truth for thee but not for me are the rich and powerful's greatest desire.

Sure, but doing it in a court of law is illegal.

Illegal but practically never actually consequential.

I've not seen the one from 1988; I'll have to check that out. I've long enjoyed the one from '66.

I also heartily recommend both seasons of Wolf Hall. About Cromwell rather than More, but still fascinating.

The 1988 one stars Charlton Heston as Thomas More and was a made for TV movie based on the original 1965 play by Robert Bolt. Very, very good. Different from the 1966 movie. But both good in different ways. Neither is better.

Oh no, my word means nothing to honest people.

Boards private jet to Monaco

Yet these superrich people crave respect so much that they endlessly poast on social networks, or buy a social network.

>these superrich people crave respect so much

Don't we all? This is one of the very basic human needs. Since they don't need to worry about food and shelter, they focus on social status and entertainment.

This is mostly true - but it will be used against you in future civil proceedings as well.

IE this person is now useless as a witness pretty much forever.

There are so few honest Americans that it hardly matters to serve such a small demographic.

Clearly nothing, since we've decided to be a nation that doesn't enforce laws.

[flagged]

I mean, that contribution to his inauguration fund is what probably got them that tariff exemption.

> Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise.

Here's the fun question though. Do Roman, Maestri et al not have any specific damages to this? (I know the answer, but it's a good question to ask....)

And what happens now to those who lied under oath? Can we get those people properly punished and send some signals? Or are they above the law somehow?

The USA is an oligarchy

> About time.

Oh c'mon, 16 years into a product line ain't too bad, is it?

If you had a kid when the App Store first came out, that kid would now be nearing high school graduation and you still can't do as you describe. The great recession, the pandemic, the iPad, proliferation of AI, legalization of Gay marriage in the states and weed in some places, annexation of crimea and the war in Ukraine, the foxconn suicide issue, 4G, LTE, 5G, fiber to the home, brexit, Golang, Rust, TypeScript, Swift, APFS, Arm and the downfall of Intel, the rise of NVIDIA, Netflix, TikTok, drones, electric cars, scooters, bikes, end-to-end design and construction of their mothership headquarters, and federal acknowledgement that climate change is an issue, have all basically happened in that time; but nope, it's for security reasons. Hell, even their lead industrial designer retired long before they'd let up.

Edit: Not that any of those have anything to do with the App Store, but still.

We didn't start the fire, it was always burning since the world's been turning...

In the inevitable case where this lands Apple serious monetary penalties affecting the quarterly earnings, how many employees will be laid off? Will Alex Roman be one of them?

I'd bet no.

If you're publishing on the app store you are part of the problem. Your customers are right to feel aggrieved.

Will Walmart let you have a label on your product saying you could get it cheaper from Amazon?

Will walmart open your packaging, review all text in the manual, and tell you that you need to reprint your manual because it has a link to your homepage "company.com" and on that page you can find a pricing page with lower prices?

Will walmart prevent you from selling, say, a fishing pole that allows you to buy fishing hooks from another store?

Apple's app-store review would reject any app that linked the company pricing page, and would reject any app that let you use an alternative payment method like paypal or a credit card on a non-apple site.

Also, in your analogy the customer has to be unable to buy your app from anywhere else (since the customer has an iPhone and there are no other stores or operating systems for iPhone)..

It really doesn't work as a good comparison imo.

The parent poster just said that customers can pay on his website so I’m assuming it’s a service surfaced by his app.

Yes! Why do people keep on asking this? Yes, practically every single tech product that you buy from Walmart will include links to their online stores in the packaging. Including Apple products! And this has been the case for ages.

I remember buying DVDs from Walmart and opening them up and the first thing you would see is a slip of paper telling you in giant letters to use some reward program or streaming service rather than buying the DVDs physically.

If you buy an iPhone from Walmart, there will be a link to the apple store in the packaging. If you buy a Switch, there will be promotions for digital downloads that directly compete with Walmart in your packaging. It's not just digital links either, when I bought a Roomba it came with instructions about how to order future purchases, filters, and parts directly from the manufacturer.

Apple bans developers from including links to alternative stores in bundled manuals and help pages. I can not think of a single physical store that does the same, and I can't think of a single tech company including Apple that doesn't link to competing storefronts in their manuals and packaging inserts.

Apple is worse than Walmart on this issue.

And that’s after you buy it. Are you willing to sell your software up front instead of a subscription? Walmart doesn’t distribute products for free that then you can pay for it after you take it home.

> Thus the Court found:

> In retail brick-and-mortar stores, consumers do not lack knowledge of options. Technology platforms differ.

Yeah, but keep going on about how this is the same as Walmart

Yet everyday, people seem to know that to use Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, etc on their phone, they have to sign up on the website since you can’t pay for either via in app purchases.

The heart of Apple's hypocrisy is this: they claim their 30% is necessary to support the developer ecosystem and fund its operations. But of course if that were true, they could easily charge a high enough platform membership fee directly to developers. Instead they opt for a structural tax to cover what are mostly completely opaque and secret operational costs. They're opaque and secret for obvious reasons: those expenses come nowhere close to the ~$30 billion in App Store commission Apple generates every year.

As described in the ruling, Apple hired a consulting group to estimate how much value developers get from the iphone platform, which found that

(1) Apple’s platform technology is worth up to 30% of a developer’s revenue. (2) Apple’s developer tools and services are worth approximately 3%–16%. (3) Apple’s distribution services are worth approximately 4%–14%. (4) Apple’s discovery services are worth approximately 5%–14%.

Then Apple claimed this study was how they came up with the 27%, but the Judge basically said nah you guys came up with that number before the study, and you even know it would be a non-starter for almost all developers.

Hire a consulting firm to tell you exactly what you want to hear, then say "see the experts said it, not us". Classic.

> Apple’s developer tools and services are worth approximately 3%–16%

That must be a joke. Xcode is so bad, compared to Android Studio, it’s not even funny. As iOS dev I have to constantly apologize to my Android team members, that, no, Xcode can’t do this and that, and, no, we can’t do X in the build pipeline. And I‘m generally 10-20% slower than them because the tooling is just terrible and flaky.

BTW there was a promising IntelliJ option for Apple development, but Apple made life so hard for them that they had to give up. It was called „AppCode“ and some people are still sad that it doesn’t exist anymore.

The first thing the consulting group would have asked Apple was "what do you want this number to be?".

That's the point of hiring consulting groups.

The funny thing is that the companies that stand to benefit the most from this and that move the most money (Netflix, Spotify, Fortnite) need Apple's platform, marketing, and distribution the least.

Indeed. I’d add a fourth category: the medium-to-long tail of ad-infested casino games for children. None of those apps are successful because of the App Store. People don’t generally start at the App Store and go looking for games like this. They are all installed from CPI ads in other ad-infested apps or on websites.

Apple is exactly like a mobster demanding a cut for “protection” — except they’ve designed and controlled the system so well that your business just cannot exist in the first place until your automatic extortion payment system is in place.

They don't. Nobody heard about Netflix and Spotify from randomly browsing App Store(Do people even browse app store feeds to see what to download?). Almost every users of them would likely have searched for it.

Maybe I should have said "_don't_ need Apple's platform, marketing, and distribution" rather than "need Apple's platform, marketing, and distribution the _least_", but I think we agree.

what discovery?

For "discovery" people would have to regularly check the App Store app and read the "today" page. Maybe perhaps Spotify or Netflix will appear there once a year among 15000 stories about games.

Or you mean search? If people search for Spotify/Netflix, they already know about it. And right now Apple will helpfully cover half of the screen with an ad for Gmail if you search for Spotify (and will hide all other Spotify apps like Spotify Kids and Spotify for Creators six screens down)

It made me laugh, if you pretend to be worth 30% of revenue (an insane markup), you better really invest in those developer tools to show it off because the sad state of xcode really isn't showing that.

I don't know where this money is going but certainly not in the developer tooling because it's absolutely terrible

If Apple were worth 30% of revenue, then they'd have no problem allowing competing app stores on their devices, because they support their rate with their value.

The fact that they're deadset against competition should tell the courts all they need to know about how competitively supportable the 30% is.

I thought Apple's argument was that the 30% pays for iOS itself, not that the 30% pays for the App Store. Under that theory there's no reason to allow other app stores.

this would be a silly argument - surely the customers buying the devices should be paying directly for the operating system?

They used to do that back when the iPhone first came out. I don’t think anybody liked that better, and having people hang around on older iOS versions was (and still is) bad for security.

iPhones never had paid iOS upgrades. iPod touch did, but that's because Apple was worried free updates would violate an accounting rule. Specifically, the iPhone was considered subscription revenue while the iPod touch was considered purchase revenue. And after an accounting scandal[0] GAAP had been changed so that you couldn't say you sold, say, a bunch of stuff that hadn't actually been finished yet, and then finish it later with, say, a software update.

This is, of course, how basically every tech company works nowadays[1], because Apple lobbied to have that accounting rule removed.

None of this has anything to do with "App Store pays for iOS". That's an excuse Apple came up with after Epic Games sued them, there's no point in time I can point to where iOS is just the bundled OS vs. "paid for with app sales". The reality is, everything pays for everything, because Apple only sells fully bundled experiences. Their opposition to sideloading or third-party iOS app stores is only somewhat related to security[2], and more related to the fact that they don't want anyone dictating to them how the customer experience is, even if those changes improve the experience.

Well, that, and the fact that they make bank off App Store apps.

[0] I'm not sure if it was Enron or Worldcom

[1] Looking at you, Tesla FSD

[2] If it was, they'd be locking down macOS

Steam takes a 30% cut, but it's actually apparently worth it for discovery and low-friction sales alone, since developers still sell on Steam when the PC is an open platform with competing storefronts with lower cuts.

Steam also reduces their cut down to 25/20% at $10m/$50m in sales, whereas Apple reduces it to 15% only for devs under $1m/yr. A small number of games/apps make the vast majority of revenue so Steam's average cut is likely considerably lower in practice.

> if you pretend to be worth 30% of revenue (an insane markup)

Back in 2008, if you were an indie dev then their 30% ask was more than reasonable because the cost-of-doing-business on other platforms (like Windows Mobile) was much higher due to the lack of any central App Store; for example, you'd often need to partner with a company like Digital River, and pay more for marketing/advertising and overcome the significant friction involved in convincing punters to register/buy from your website, download the app *.cab files to their PC, install the app onto your device, and hope no-one uploads a copy to a filesharing network because this was before the days when an OS itself would employ DRM to enforce a license for third-party software.

...then one day Apple comes along and says: "We can manage all of that for you, for far less than what you'd pay for e-commerce and digital distribution, and our customers have lots of disposable income".

Ostensibly, competition should have come from the Android and (lol) Windows App Stores: "surely if Android's Play Store offers devs better rates then devs will simply not target iOS anymore and Apple will reduce their % to stay competitive" - but Apple's secret-sauce of a markedly more affluent customer base with already saved credit-card details meant that Android apps leant more on ad-supported apps while more iOS apps could charge an up-front amount, not have ads, and result in iOS devs still making far more money on Apple's platform.

--------

There exists an argument that Apple should not be forced to open-up the iOS platform because Apple is selling a closed platform on the merits of it being a closed platform, and Apple's customers want a closed platform (even if they don't realize it) because having a closed platform looks like the only way to enforce a minimum standard of quality and to keep malware out precisely because normal-human-users (i.e. our collective mothers) will install malware because the installation instructions for "Facebook_Gold_App1_100%_Real_honest.app" tell them to disable system protections.

> Back in 2008, if you were an indie dev then their 30% ask was more than reasonable because the cost-of-doing-business on other platforms (like Windows Mobile) was much higher due to the lack of any central App Store

The first iPhone indie devs were Mac indie devs who already knew Objective-C and Cocoa and Xcode and paid 0% to Apple on the Mac.

> because having a closed platform looks like the only way to enforce a minimum standard of quality and to keep malware out precisely because normal-human-users (i.e. our collective mothers) will install malware because the installation instructions

Well no, the most secure platform in 2025 is still the web. You can't get as much data in a web browser as you can in a mobile app and the sandboxing is tighter.

And I may mention that the majority of the appstore revenue comes from casino like games, not really something I would give it to my family.

And sure, I'm opened to the idea that the appstore was innovative in 2008, unfortunately for Apple, we're now in 2025 and it clearly isn't anymore.

At the time, the Verizon/Qualcomm BREW platform had absurd levels of revenue sharing: Up to 90% (!!!) went to the carrier unless you were big enough to negotiate a specific deal.

The 30% that Apple announced was a game changer.

2010: "Man, charging people money to install software on a feature-phone they bought is kinda fucked up. Both companies are in the wrong for doing that."

2025: "You don't appreciate how lower publishing fees foster competition, except when there's no fees at all, because that's too competitive for the OEM."

This is obscene lmao.

if you take the high end for all of these points, Apple is claiming 74% of the revenue is thanks to them.

Also, there's a certain level of 'hand-waving' here where if you're developing for iOS you're almost forced to have Apple hardware in the first place to run+test (hell, even Android can be dev'd from almost anything...)

You don't pay consulting agencies to put you in legal jeopardy. The judge is right.

This made sense for an app that was sold on the store.

It didn't make sense to me for media from an external subscription or store account was taxed by apple (like netflix or kindle).

They don’t make that claim. That’s the service they are selling and the margin they choose. The royalty is similar to software retailer margins going back a long time. Steam charges a similar rate.

It’s pretty trivial to bypass. Just don’t charge for your software, and use the app to access paid resources purchased outside the platform. My company distributes a few dozen apps to thousands of employees, Apple gets $0, because they utilize an existing subscription or license unconnected to Apple.

There are many caveats on this. For example, Apple's terms clearly state that developers must use Apple’s in-app purchase (IAP) system for digital goods or services. So you're restricted to only subscription based pricing. No upgrade pricing. No microtransactions.

Additionally Apple remains the arbiter of what kind of content and apps may be listed. Until recently they were blocking all emulators and cloud gaming apps. They used to block all crypto apps. They still selectively block gambling apps. They still block torrenting and adult apps.

Additionally, Apple is famous for arbitrary and selectively enforced rules. Many developers have their updates rejected for any and no reason after an automated system rejects them for specious reasons.

Additionally, developers are blocked from linking out. They can't up-sell, which is a critical component of a SaaS business model. Nothing in the app can tell users where to subscribe or how to upgrade or change their credit card details. This one alone kills most SaaS applications unless they use Apple's IAPs.

Isn't the point of this case that even free apps can't even advertise their direct payment systems?

The problem is less the actual % itself and the fact that it's bundled in with so many things you can't pick or substitute. You can't avoid the app store and you can't avoid the Apple developer tools because they force you to use both of them. So then charging money for something you don't have an alternative to is the issue.

Steam might charge a similar rate but you aren't forced to use them. You can deliver games to PC gamers in a number of ways and many large games opt to not be on Steam.

But game developers can sell steam keys directly or cia other resellers and avoid the steam commision entirely. So Valve is goving them a fee service and only chargeing a commision when valve themselves generate the sell.

Yeah, until Apple asks you "politely" to move your subscription to IAP.

> Just don’t charge for your software, and use the app to access paid resources purchased outside the platform.

That introduces insane friction and you lose a ton of customers

Were they transparent, what would inhibit developers from bargaining against the costs and benefits shown? Sometimes that also outweighs the benefits of transparency.

You just can't show anything to anyone without kicking a wasp's nest.

I am not defending Apple, if anything, I am pro-Android here, but I understand the pickle they'd be in, were they be transparent with the cost structure.

Well, yeah. It would have shown that their commissions are nothing but rent-seeking.

Exactly my point!

This would kick the wasp's nest of "they (Apple) don't need this much money to operate, they can do well with 10% profit!"

Which is very hard to admit, that profit margins are arbitrary when you, indeed, dominate the market.

Apple doesn't want (nor need) to give anyone a handle to anyone to make them accountable. It is not a charity.

(Again, I'm not defending Apple, but I do defend corporate liberties, in general.)

When a company builds the moat too high (i.e. restrictions on external sub signups) it becomes monopolistic.

Apple is honestly worse than Microsoft in so many ways as far as restrictions (nowadays, anyway) and yet it's taken this long even to get here.

(To be clear, I am not a fan of Google's actions in the mobile space either...)

Mobile space

Ad space

Search space

And more!

Are you defending their corporate liberty to withhold information or to lie about the information being withheld?

It isn't about transparency.

It is about illegal anticompetitive behavior.

Apple didn't charge tax on all app store purchases to protect themselves, it was done out of greed and malice.

You're assuming that Apple is acting in good faith. An actual, literal judge has decided the evidence shows that Apple was not acting in good faith, and in fact were behaving illegally. This isn't a "both sides" argument, Apple is definitively in the wrong.

> what would inhibit developers from bargaining against the costs and benefits shown?

Another word for that is "competing". And yeah, exactly.

The math of a one time fee is different than a percentage. Not sure what you are getting at by presenting a business model that doesn’t make sense as an argument

Is there any hope of a non-joke fine here? Or are we just looking at another kiss of the wrists as them and Google and all the other big tech cos fuck literally everyone over?

The important penalty isn’t a fine, it’s a forced change of behavior to comply with the injunction. The referral for criminal contempt charges will end up being a slap on the wrist if they are even charged though.

No this is actually going get Tim Cook's attention. Contempt can mean actual jail time for execs.

The precedent is significant too. Remember the EU is currently reviewing Apple’s malicious compliance with the DMA, there are also regulators in other countries moving forward too.

A fine isn't even necessary: Apple's App Store business just ended. Between app sales and IAP it has a 30% tax. If an app developer swaps out for a Stripe portal they're paying 3% and probably at least doubling their own profit margin.

Only an idiot would still be selling apps through Apple's payments next week. The only way Apple will make any money at all on apps is if it drops it's fees to 10% or below.

A fine is still necessary because (as per the original ruling), they should have never foisted their store on people seventeen years ago when they first launched it and certainly should not have done so when the court ordered them to stop four years ago.

If there isn't a fine, the message will be that it's fine to profit off of ignoring court orders until you face thread of contempt charges.

When Apple first launched the App Store, developers everywhere were praising Apple for offering such favourable terms.

If the terms were so great and the value to developers so high, it should definitely have been able to succeed in a competitive market, and need not have been forced on people.

I think most of the praise was because before the App Store, you quite literally could not install software on iOS. If the Mac worked the same way, people would absent-mindedly praise Apple for it too.

Because it was better than anything existing at the time (fees in the few existing stores were up to 70%).

That was 18 years ago. The times, they are a-changing

I look forward to Apple suddenly dropping fees and increasing R&D for the App Store when they face real competition.

Steam still exists on PC.

Unless the fine is the better part of a trillion dollars, it won’t make any difference.

Apple has close to 1/2 trillion in revenue a year. A few billion is rounding error.

Some country recently fined Apple every day until they resolved the issue. I think such solution would both help push Apple to actually resolve the issue and do so in a timely manner.

As much money as they have, no shareholder wants to see a $1m/day expense on the balance sheet.

$1m/day since they launched the iPhone App Store in 2008 is roughly 2 months worth of 30% App Store commision revenue. I.e. they'd be making more money by keeping such a small fine on the balance sheet than complying.

The same thing at $1b/day or rapidly increasing with time might be effective though, but I'm not sure what's really assignable by the given court or not.

If they refuse to comply, why don't we just... arrest them?

Like, you know, we do for someone who was poor and starving and stole 10$ of food?

That is exactly what the judge has triggered. She has referred Alex Roman and anyone else complicit in Apple for review of contempt of course. This carries actual prison time.

Should be Tim Cook and the entire board of directors, though. They are the ones ultimately responsible.

You can’t arrest a fictitious person.

Why not?

If a company is a person, it can go in jail.

Freeze their ability to do anything above basic life support without the permission of the judge or court.

Freeze their ability to do anything period. Physically lock the incorporation documents in a prison cell. They won't need to do "basic life support", the documents will be provided with trays of food, water, and adequate opportunities for exercise by the prison facility. If they need more than that, they can petition their former customers to send money to their prison commissary account for the purchase of snacks, toiletries and such.

A fictitious person's executives and directors are typically real. Or, if fictitious as well, go down the rabbit hole of said contractors until you finally find the real ones.

In the country I'm from, each exec gets a partial sentence in accordance with their contribution to the criminal act. And no, the total amount on years in prison needn't match the total, there's a minimum and also percentages always exceed 100%.

Limited liability doesn't and shouldn't protect criminals from imprisonment.

Careful. The real humans at the bottom of that rabbit hole are the individual shareholders. That is the real root of this problem -- the people that ultimately profit from this behavior (a group that, ironically, almost certainly includes the judge in this case, and most of the people in this thread) have no responsibility whatsoever.

Because they're not responsible? We (shareholders) pay executives to manage the companies. This means doing what is best for the company, not committing crimes.

Tim Cook isn't fictious, even if it sometimes appears that way.

Legally, Tim Cook is just another employee.

Apple is a corporation.

Legally, corporations are persons.

Corporations are often referred to as fictitious persons in legal contexts to reduce confusion.

I assure you apple is run by real humans

Is your comment asserting that there are no people poor enough to steal food? Or are you claiming that poor people do not get arrested and are in fact treated with kindness and compassion by the various police agencies?

The “them” of Apple is a fictitious person.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/fictitious-person

Your assumptions are absurd.

Thanks and apologies, I totally misinterpreted your comment.

Refers to corporate personhood. You can't jail Apple Inc.

Piercing the corporate veil is a thing.

[dead]

that's still not even a billion a year though, on a revenue of hundreds of billions.

Or toss Tim Apple in the huscow for contempt.

I don’t think that’s likely with the referral to the US attorney.

I think Cook will probably find that there is a dollar value that will get Trump to instruct a us attorney to drop charges

Hoosegow?

It's Ozark-Germanic for Hoosegow, though I may have heard it as far west as Amarugia.

The court is pushing for criminal censure of some of the involved participants. If that happens -- and it absolutely should -- it will have a tremendous impact on the hubris seen in Apple, and in the industry in general. Hopefully bribes don't get them out of this, and some Apple execs really do end up with prison sentences.

Apple makes tens of billions of dollars a year off App Store royalties. If this ruling is upheld this fine has a net present value of 100 billion - trillion dollars depending on your discount rate. They will lose billions of dollars a year forever.

The timing of this with Tim Sweeney's interview with Lex Friedman is great. Watching a few hours of it, it's no wonder he hasn't slowed down in the slightest in this fight against Apple, he is unrelenting in his focus.

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Apple should abandon the console model for iPhones (and iPads, etc.). It's corrosive. By my back-of-the napkin math (subtracting an estimate of Google's quarterly search payments from Apple's stated "services" revenue and comparing to iPhone revenue), Apple would make the same amount of money by just charging me an extra 25% when I bought a phone. I would gladly pay that up-front instead of indirectly when I buy apps.

A 25% price jump would cause much grumbling. That being said, I’d like to believe that there’s a real market for bootloader unlocked iPhones.

Its not a dollar value. It’s an ongoing percentage based tax on your business relationships and consumption with other providers.

For instance, say Netflix has an iOS app with 10M installs. Apple wants 30% of the subscription revenue even though their costs are static. The only variable cost is payment infrastructure which to some degree is proportional to amounts (fraud etc). But what is the market value of that? A couple percent at most? Are apple even taking any risk?

And honestly, Apple could easily take 5-10% and I’m sure lots of vendors would still use them due to user preference - it’s trustworthy, provided an overview of ongoing subscriptions, and importantly you can cancel without being on a 30min retention call with absolute garbage companies.

But that needs to be played out by the markets. Competition will make Apples option cheaper and most likely competitors will step up to match the UX at lower prices. Free markets, like democracy, have this paradox of tolerance, ie bad faith players can abuse the very system to destroy it in self-interest.

I was looking at quarterly revenue numbers—it seems like a dollar value to me.

Responding to a comment by bn-l, but also to the general sentiment about Apple and untrusted code I often see on hacker news.

> The broader consumer base will install anything a bad actor wants them to and then blame the manufacturer for not stopping them with some draconian rule.

Has this even happened? Has anyone ever sued and won the case with a laptop manufacturer (or Microsoft or Apple), because they downloaded and executed an executable with malware on their computer? Do average people really blame Microsoft for malware? I would kind of agree that they should, but not because Microsoft allows people to run untrusted code, but because the security model of Windows (and other PC operating systems) is still bad. But not because it allows people to run unsigned code.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think we should return to security model of old operating systems - smartphone OSes definitely got that right, except for the part that forces users to give up control of their devices. It's just that the argument, that allowing people to install software not signed by Apple on their own devices would make iPhones insecure, is totally unsubstantiated to me.

I see some people still arguing that (ex. older) people will do what they are told and will install shady software. If Apple really cares, they could provide a switch that allows users to disable installing "unverified" software. Maybe ask about it during setup. Maybe allow locking it until factory reset, or allow head of icloud family to control it. There are many options to keep some people secure from all unverified apps, while allowing others to run them. Not to mention that the idea that all apps not signed by Apple are somehow malicious is just bad. You could have other entities than Apple verify code. Currently, even running apps you yourself wrote, on your own hardware, is hard and limited. For no good reason.

The only reason Apple is blocking other stores, or preventing people from installing homebrew, is to collect more money. It's good that they are investing into security of their software and hardware, but in this particular case, security is used only as a distraction.

> . If Apple really cares, they could provide a switch that allows users to disable installing "unverified" software.

This exists on the Mac. You can configure Gatekeeper to always allow unsigned executables and packages to run, and skip the "You should move this to the Trash it could damage your computer" BS prompts. You can only do this with a Configuration Profile.

Works where archive.ph is blocked, no Apple surveillance disguised as "convenience", no Javascript:

https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1DXcJN

Read the opinion:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...

Apple will get their money. Expect other costs to make up for any lost costs because of this.

"In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees crafting the warning screen for Project Michigan discussed how best to frame its language. (CX-206.) Mr. Onak suggested the warning screen should include the language: “By continuing on the web, you will leave the app and be taken to an external website” because “‘external website’ sounds scary, so execs will love it.” (Id. at .2.) From Mr. Onak’s perspective, of the “execs” on the project, Mr. Schiller was at the top. (Feb. 2025 Tr. 1340:4–6 (Onak).) One employee further wrote, “to make your version even worse you could add the developer name rather than the app name.” (CX-206.4.) To that, another responded “ooh - keep going.” (Id.)

I could never imagine Apple employees doing it like this. I knew they had to have discussions about the scare screen, but come on! This is pure evil.

> I could never imagine Apple employees doing it like this.

Curious why your imagination is so limited here regarding a pretty standard human behavior pattern. Do you personally know Apple employees or is it more of a general respect for their products or ...?

I pretty much grew up on this site. 19yo-37yo. economics dropout from nowhere => waiter => startup => sold => 7 year tenure at google => back to a new startup), and I honestly was absolutely horribly over-the-top stunned at how people were just...normal? to put it nicely?...at Google.

You're absolutely right that it's an unwarranted assumption, yet simultaneously, I just always assumed higher class == higher morals. If anything it seemed to select for senior year of HS math class score and sociopathy.

Stuff I used to hear as grousing, from tired, defeated, adults, that couldn't hack it now ring as universal truths.

> higher class == higher morals

Are you serious? First off, stop using the term "high class" for immoral people. They are well beneath the whole morale chain and the fact they managed to get to your-definition-of-high-class means that lots of dirty tactics were used which are well beyond what a normal human is capable of

> it's an unwarranted assumption,

I'm not sure why you're reacting indignantly. I'll reconsider being vulnerable and honest next time people ask a question.

He was virtue signaling. It's sadly all too common these days. As if he or any human isn't capable of horrible atrocities given the right circumstances. Don't let him or anyone stifle your speech. Say what you need to say regardless of the sniping. You can't turn in your karma points for anything anyway, not even a little eraser.

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Want something even more evil? I got you.

When saurik sued Apple for antitrust reasons over Cydia[1] (which sadly ended up going nowhere), at some point a hearing was held where his lawyer accidentally read out something that was supposed to be protected/sealed. Apple's lawyer quickly interjected, but what saurik's attorney got to read before ended up in the official transcript[2], and it's straight up disgusting. From p.18:

"For example, something where -- they are talking about an iOS update that, quote, broke Cydia Impactor. Where they said, it feels too good to destroy someone's spirit. We did something else today that will kill him again with a little smiley emoticon. That, we can specifically talk about with respect to Cydia."

[1] For those not in the know, Cydia was the de-facto App Store for jailbroken iDevices, the prominent third-party marketplace before AltStore.

[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18730843/75/saurikit-ll...

FWIW, the lawsuit went pretty far--all the way to an appeals court--but failed on what was ostensibly a statute of limitations issue that made very little sense and feels wrong :/. I still intend to write a giant article about it at some point, and probably do a long interview / lamentation about it on t3dotgg's YouTube channel... it just has felt so difficult to approach as the whole thing was so upsetting :(.

Hey! I should have phrased that differently, sorry! I actually followed the lawsuit as it was progressing, even listening to the oral arguments as soon as they were uploaded to the Ninth Circuit's YT channel. Such a shame...

This wasn't just a random employee either, it was “Rafael Onak, User Experience Writing Manager at Apple”.

If you think this is the only time they pull this kind of crap and then hide behind some privacy/design/UX bullshit argument, then I've got news for you...

How much does Apple select employees for loyalty when hiring? One-eyed competitive fanbois?

Companies do want smart machiavellian people that independently act in the interests of the company (archetypical C-suite executives).

Google has had a number of ethical employees damage Google from the inside.

A company can be damaged by smart motivated machiavellian employees using their skills against their own company.

I've noticed competitive gaming training/selecting people to win-at-all-costs. Presumably the C-suite is benefiting from the influx of people that understand manipulation and complexity.

I know several people who work there who are Android and windows users and haven’t switched. Internally it seems they’re not very kool-aid heavy.

Does this mean Apple will have to give up their % fees or that they have to allow third party app stores in the US? And when does that go into effect?

> Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered the iPhone-maker to allow developers to steer users to alternative methods of paying for services or subscriptions offered in the App Store. The company also can no longer impose fees in such scenarios or restrict the ability of software-makers to offer links or otherwise communicate alternate payment options with consumers.

The ruling means this starts immediately it seems, as I cannot see a date listed anywhere.

So : make a free app. Ask people to buy the non-free version on a website. Apple gets 0. No revenue at all for providing stable apis and sdks? How’s that sustainable? The app store itself would be a gigantic loss leader that has to be paid for by iphone sales.

If console makers have to do the same, consoles triple in price

> No revenue at all for providing stable apis and sdks? How’s that sustainable?

They should go down the hall and ask the MacOS developers how they do it.

...Apple makes revenue on the devices? On any monthly subscriptions you take with them? On the developers paying for licenses?

And let's not act as if people would use iOS if they couldn't have their apps. It is so much of a net gain to Apple to allow people to develop their apps there's a good chance it's indirectly profitable without any direct revenue from IAP's.

Neither!

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I’ve always been critical of headlines that frame the company as the culprit—especially when the company can’t be sent to prison or face personal consequences. No, it wasn’t "Apple" that violated antitrust laws—Tim Cook approved the actions. Apple doesn't make decisions on its own; it operates under the direction and vision of the people in charge.

It's far too convenient for C-level executives to reap the rewards when their leadership drives profits, only to shift blame to "the company" when things go wrong. Accountability should work both ways.

I agree with the core of your sentiment, but I don't think moving the framing from the company to the person is the answer. It makes it too easy for a company to put the blame on an individual that has conveniently been fired (either for the relevant reason or any other) and then act like the problem is solved. The individuals most responsible should face personal consequences. The company should also face consequences. As they say: One bad apple spoils the bunch. (no pun intended)

No one ever suggests that we hold the owners of companies liable for what their companies do.

I know that this is the entire point of limited liability corporations -- to divorce ownership from responsibility -- but maybe that wasn't such a good idea.

Finally. The AppStore rules are ridiculous.

Apple has zero moral justification for them. They are quadruple-dipping:

1. Consumers pay premium prices for Apple devices.

2. Developers have to pay $100 a year to be able to publish an app.

3. Developers need to buy expensive Apple hardware to develop for iOS. XCode doesn't work on Linux or Windows.

4. And on top of it, Apple also wants 30% of all the gross app sales.

All while their tools that developers _have_ to use are buggy and often nigh unsusable (Apple Connect....).

But wait, there's more! To keep the stronghold on developers, Apple is not allowing third-party apps to use JITs, resulting in a huge amount of time wasted to work around that.

> All while their tools that developers _have_ to use are buggy and often nigh unsusable (Apple Connect....).

I'm moving to a job where I don't have to be the build/devops engineer for a product with an iOS app. To say I'm relieved wouldn't even be the half of it. What made it particularly worse was that our release cycle was every two months which is just enough time for Apple to completely wreck the build.

Absolutely terrible experience.

also, you can't install software on your own device. Even when you can, you have to ask apple permission.

The broader consumer base will install anything a bad actor wants them to and then blame the manufacturer for not stopping them with some draconian rule.

This expectation exists because Apple/Google/monopolists sell it. But it's not realistic, the app stores are cesspools. We need a culture shift to being more selective about installing software. Clearer permissions, better architecture, and trusted repositories with reputations to maintain. Installing software without any validation of safety should be possible but scary (show a terminal log reporting useful technical information or something).

Permissioning is a mess – among other things of course. I feel that permissions to access any resource(image, location, files etc) could be given without necessarily giving access to the PII value that resource holds, e.g. running a no side effects function on it on-device or on a trusted service that is readonly to me and write-only to 3rd parties.

Please, side-loading is usually an annoying involved process targeted at developers which the average consumer cannot accidentally do.

A bad actor would have better luck telling a victim "just ship me your phone and login password for some emergency maintenance" than instructing a user through sideloading an app onto their smart fridge.

I, personally, would be happy if iOS had android-style side-loading where you have to enable developer mode, promise you're not an idiot, and go from there.

the fact that "side-loading" is even a name is sort of ridiculous.

Even on apple's other operating system it is just downloading and running a program.

I remember when you could just stick a floppy or later cd into a system from anywhere and install and run a program.

it was called "install and run".

The Play Store proves you absolutely wrong about this. It was an unfiltered Wild West until very recently.

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You go where your customers are.

Companies can't ignore Apple if they want to sell in the US so they're forced into their ecosystem. It's not a preference like you imply.

I'll never understand how people defend blatantly anti-competitive behavior even when it hurts themselves.

Here is the wording from the judge: https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/3a81ee5d-5103-4306-...

Google, Apple, Facebook all receiving judicial face slaps these past few days! Let's continue with Amazon, Microsoft, and the other supergiant corporations.

So what actually happens here?

Other than the possible contempt for the guy who lied under oath (and some bad press), doesn't this injunction just mean that apple has to do... what it was already previously ordered to do?

Are there no fines or consequences for them doing this? Am I missing something else here?

Previously they were ordered to allow outside payments. Apple “complied” by requiring a 27% cut on all outside payments (slight discount to cover the cost of Stripe or whatever), a massive scary popup saying that outside sites can’t be trusted, and the link wasn’t allowed to be in the “payment flow” (where else would it be?), and the right to audit your finances. There were some other things but that’s what I remember as being the most egregious.

Since this basically defies what the court would require, they are now explicitly telling Apple that none of that is allowed, and that there cannot be any restrictions on placement or styling of links to outside payments. As the judge said, no reasonable person would believe that their actions are complying with that they were instructed to do.

> Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court's Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the coverup made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.

once again will ask why iPhones are treated any differently from other computing devices — we need legislative solutions that allow consumers to load software (or even other operating systems) on any computing device they own.

restricting software distribution on any platform under the guise of needing to be kept “secure” always seemed anticompetitive to me - that should apply regardless of Apple’s particular behavior with the courts in this example.

Get ready to answer why an iPhone is different than an xbox

I’m principled in my stance, I think if you own said Xbox you should be able to load software on that as well.

It isn't. Consoles at this stage are general purpose computers with hardware and software explicitly designed to prevent consumers using it as such. If consumer rights had any real teeth, any hardware device would be required to allow their owners to install any piece of software of their choosing, including replacing the operating system.

Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch should be forced to open up as well.

Closed ecosystems only benefit the corporations that control them.

At the very least, sony doesn't get offended with new jailbreaks while nintendo will chase you down for even browsing an emulator's website

One has billions of users, the other has millions. One has 100s of thousands of companies trying to to do business with that platform's users, the other has 100s of companies trying to do business with that platform's users.

scale and usage matters. Apple has > 50% market share in the USA (the place relevant to USA law). So, being a monopoly they get treated differently than a non-monopoly.

Even if they had less than 50%, people bank, invest, shop, talk, communicate, book hotels, flights, and effectively live their lives on smartphones. On XBox they play games and same small percent play music or watch movies there (I suspect most switch over to their Smart TV/Apple TV/.. for that).

No, it doesn't. They're not enforcing this under anti-trust law.

they aren't? The title is "Apple Violated Antitrust Ruling, Judge Finds"

the first sentence in the article is:

> A federal judge hammered Apple for violating an antitrust ruling related to App Store restrictions and took the extraordinary step of referring the matter to federal prosecutors for a criminal contempt investigation.

Seems like it's about antitrust law

Fair enough, I replied poorly, but the judgment doesn't appear to be based on Apple being monopoly or size of the business, as far as I can tell. The issue appears to be of anti-steering, more than the number of customers/its market share. Epic notably failed to prove Sherman act violations, didn't it?

The actual judgment: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25924283-epic-v-appl...

>After a bench trial, this Court entered judgment on September 10, 2021, finding thatcertain of Apple’s anti-steering rules violate the California Unfair Competition Law (“UCL”)under its unfair prong. ... As to the merits of Apple’s UCL violations, Apple did not directly challenge this Court’s application of the UCL’s tethering and balancing tests, instead arguing that(i) the UCL’s “safe harbor” doctrine insulates its liability because Epic failed to establish Sherman Act liability ... As to Apple’s “unfair” practices under the UCL, the Court explainedthat Epic could demonstrate unfairness under either a “tethering” test or a “balancing” test. Id. at1053. The “tethering” test required Epic to “show that Apple’s conduct (1) ‘threatens an incipientviolation of an antitrust law,’ (2) ‘violates the policy or spirit of one of those laws because itseffects are comparable to or the same as a violation of the law,’ or (3) ‘otherwise significantlythreatens or harms competition.’” Id. at 1052 (quoting Cel-Tech Commc’ns, Inc. v. Los AngelesCellular Tel. Co., 973 P.2d 527, 544 (Cal. 1999)). While the Court held that Epic’s claims basedon app distribution and in-app payment processing restrictions failed to state a claim of unfairpractices, the Court held that Apple’s anti-steering provisions were severable and constitutedunfair practices under the UCL

I'm not sure that the scale or usage really matters.

the judgment doesn't appear to be based on Apple being monopoly or size of the business

our anti-trust laws are not about being a monopoly or the size of your business: they are about abusing market dominance (where up or downstream has no choice) with unfair business practices.

a monopoly that charges fair prices and does not abuse suppliers and customers will not encounter any legal difficulty

Correct. You're a "monopoly" if you act like one because in a competitive environment if you abuse customers and partners you will lose.

Basically every reply gets it wrong. The answer is that the Xbox isn't developed in California. This judgment was applied under California's UCL, not any federal anti-trust law, despite being in federal court. Epic wasn't able to prove Apple a monopoly, because it's not. Applying California's UCL to Microsoft, Sony, etc is going to be a harder sell in courts.

> Epic wasn't able to prove Apple a monopoly, because it's not.

Unless your name is T. Cook, you lack the authority to make that statement conclusively. The judge claims that Apple is guilty of perjury, and never corrected the executive that made misleading statements. If that testimony was fabricated, then there is every reason to believe Apple is obstructing information that could benefit the prosecution. There is no other feasible alibi in this scenario besides their lawyers all calling in sick. It's one thing to make a mistake, it's another thing to insist it's truth.

Let's not forget that Apple was headed down this same road with the DOJ, too. They are being investigated for a pattern of behavior that is not new, meaning they very well could be guilty of monopoly abuse right this very second. Saying "because it's not" is like telling Lance Ito to drop the OJ charges. Apple is not guilty until proven innocent; but claiming their innocence in certainty is a base lie. You do not actually know, either.

Both allow to have software developed for by any 3rd parties - that should include any and the original device seller should not be able to control the distribution.

If you really ask: xbox is pretty much the same as an x86-64 PC, running Windows (and having AMD GPU). It just bit more sealed.

One way that they are different is that the xbox does let you sideload:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

Which… while we’re at it. Gaming would be much better if consoles didn’t exist anymore. Games would be more optimized for PC and manufacturers would just be building prebuilt gaming PCs.

We also would have more Switch competition in the ARM gaming space instead of x64 handhelds and Android windows emulation if these walled gardens didn’t exist.

Consoles are sold at-cost to consumers, or sometimes even at a loss: https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-loses-up-to-200-on-ever...

iPhones are sold at a _premium_.

If iPhones were sold at-cost to consumers, then Apple would have been right to ask developers to pay 30% fees.

I think this is the real answer, however it would be difficult to use it as an excuse for the model since there are laws also against selling at a loss to undercut competitors.

It's a more difficult argument. Consoles are not competing with regular general-purpose computers, and the console manufacturers go out of their way to make it impossible to install unapproved third-party software on them.

And since all the console manufacturers are selling the hardware at loss or with low margins, they can argue that it's just how the market works (free razors but expensive razor blades).

If consoles are sold at loss to gain "monopoly power", then that is anti competitive and should not be allowed. This would lead (or maybe already resulted) to pathetic printer and ink cartridge situation

I'm ambivalent about consoles.

However, for the consoles to make sense, they _have_ to be an oligopoly. There can't be 100 brands of competing consoles.

The main feature of traditional consoles that would be lost in this scenario: guaranteed compatibility of games.

Why not? Game devs want to be compatible with multiple consoles. Users want games to be compatible to be with their console.

So, who is causing this friction? Console companies. Now, there may be technical limitations due to games being such a unique kind of software. But at the end of day, they are software. Games can be packaged to support multiple formats or a standard interface.

One is a general computing device and one is for a specific task (gaming).

That seems rather arbitrary. I'm not doing any general computing on my iPhone, I'm just browsing Hacker News and watching YouTube. If your contention is that the phone is capable of doing more than those two things, well, isn't the Xbox capable of doing more than just gaming?

You're not. The majority of phone users replaced their computers with a phone. They are using their phone for everything they used to use their computers for. Almost no one is using an XBox to replace their computer.

> The majority of phone users replaced their computers with a phone

Source?

I can't find anything that backs that up.

https://intelpoint.co/insights/only-2-2-of-internet-users-wo...

Are you pushing back on the word "majority" or on the concept that many people use their phones for nearly everything they used to use their computers for but that next to no one does the same with an Xbox?

That the majority has replaced their computers with smartphones.

That link though doesn't say that. It simply shows global ownership of smartphones is higher than computers which is rather different altogether.

That's nothing to do with it. The judgment repeatedly talks about Epic as a competing game store. I'm not sure how else you'd describe the app store of consoles.

Welcome to EU's fight with Apple (and Google)

I’d really like to bring the fight to the US in a more meaningful way!

> once again will ask why iPhones are treated any differently from other computing devices

And then you immediately state a way they should be treated differently (worse).

can you expand on what you find worse about the concept of having full access to any computer you own?

Their stated way applies to all computing devices, not just iPhones.

Related:

https://mobilegamer.biz/apples-phil-schiller-refuses-to-fix-...

"She also referred the case to prosecutors for potential criminal investigation into the company and a top finance executive."

That's big. You really have to piss off a judge for them to refer a case for criminal investigation.

i think all you need to do is commit a crime

A non-paywalled article, containing the link to the full decision: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43851672

Full 80 page court transcript:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...

> iPhone users are accustomed to using the App Store to make digital purchases, and changing their behavior could prove difficult

Apple Pay on websites works flawlessly and is great for impulse purchases. Its the same as the inapp experience.

I think this user experience will be fine.

Besides nothing, I wonder what penalty they’ll face.

2025, this marks 11+ years I have been saying that App Store is not sustainable.

They should have made a separate Game Store and continue to collect those 30% from games, which protect 75% to 80% of their current App Store revenue.

Then 5 - 6% for all subscription based services like Netflix and Spotify. If you include the Credit Card Processing and other tax / VAT report this is a fair amount I think most company would be on board.

And 10% for everything else. Including Tipping and other IAP etc.

Apple would have protected most of their App Store revenue, generate lots of good will and continue their walled garden path.

But for whatever reason over the years every time I mentioned it I get downvoted.

Now it may be too late. The damage to developer relationship, to many business and to its brand.

I'm glad this happened, although I would have prefered if the result came from a new law eg. the Open App Markets Act rather than have to rely on what is or is not legally considered a market in terms of the sherman act etc.

What was Alex Roman's lie? I'm having a hard time figuring that out.

It's not very clear in OP, but is reported better in other places.

> Apple employees attempted to mislead the Court by testifying that the decision to impose a commission was grounded in AG’s report. The testimony of Mr. Roman, Vice President of Finance, was replete with misdirection and outright lies. He even went so far as to testify that Apple did not look at comparables to estimate the costs of alternative payment solutions that developers would need to procure to facilitate linked-out purchases.

> The Court finds that Apple did consider the external costs developers faced when utilizing alternative payment solutions for linked out transactions, which conveniently exceeded the 3% discount Apple ultimately decided to provide by a safe margin. Apple did not rely on a substantiated bottoms-up analysis during its months-long assessment of whether to impose a commission, seemingly justifying its decision after the fact with the AG’s report.

> Mr. Roman did not stop there, however. He also testified that up until January 16, 2024, Apple had no idea what fee it would impose on linked-out purchases […] Another lie under oath: contemporaneous business documents reveal that on the contrary, the main components of Apple’s plan, including the 27% commission, were determined in July 2023.

> Neither Apple, nor its counsel, corrected the, now obvious, lies. They did not seek to withdraw the testimony or to have it stricken (although Apple did request that the Court strike other testimony). Thus, Apple will be held to have adopted the lies and misrepresentations to this Court.

https://9to5mac.com/2025/05/01/a-senior-apple-exec-could-be-...

all these big companies being hypocrites. congress should just pass a law that you can't be big and end the charades.

I think that's actually the effect of anti-trust/anti-monopoly laws.

There's a point where companies get "too big to fail"/"too big to jail" and have outsize effect on the country (especially if the country is stupid enough to pass a Citizens United law that explicitly allows them to do this). Anti-trust laws are the main way that the government tries to prevent this, and haven't really been used since Reaganomics decided that big == efficient. Until recently.

Passing a law that companies cannot exceed a certain size (market cap as a percentage of GDP, I guess?) would probably be a simpler way of achieving this. Though, obviously, the accounting profession would roll up its collective sleeves and declare "challenge accepted".

With only a passing knowledge of the field, I'm aware that the standard of monopolistic effect varies between the EU and US (neither specifically uses financial size as the standard). In the EU it's about whether there is sufficient competition in the market, whereas in the US it's about whether the price is sufficiently competitive.

In US it's basically "whether there's harm to the consumer", which is so nebulous that large monopolists can often successfully argue that their abusive practices are a net benefit (usually by arguing that prices are lower).

It wasn't always like that, though. We used to have antitrust with serious teeth in this country. And then it literally got borked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox

https://archive.ph/ZQLtD

The article is short enough that it makes more sense to quote it in full than to provide an archive link:

> A federal judge hammered Apple for violating a ruling in an antitrust case that required the company to loosen certain restrictions it imposes on software-makers in its App Store.

> Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered the iPhone-maker to allow developers to steer users to alternative methods of paying for services or subscriptions offered in the App Store. The company also can no longer impose fees in such scenarios or restrict the ability of software-makers to offer links or otherwise communicate alternate payment options with consumers.

> “Apple willfully chose not to comply with this court’s injunction,” she said in the ruling. “It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers.” She referred the case to federal prosecutors to determine whether a criminal contempt investigation is appropriate.

> The order is the latest twist in the long-running legal dispute between Apple and Epic Games, developer of the popular videogame “Fortnite.”

For me, the archive.ph link now hits a CAPTCHA.

Full article, works where archive.ph is blocked, no Javascript required, no tracking^1:

https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1DXcJN

1. Archive.{is,md,ph,etc.} puts the reader's IP address in a "spy pixel" URL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_pixel

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23316085

Archive.{is,md,ph,etc.} is not the same "service" as archive.org

For example, the later does not serve fulltext WSJ articles

https://web.archive.org/web/20250501001608if_/https://www.ws...

The CAPTCHA, a "service" from Cloudflare, is hit when using archive.{is,ph,md,etc.} at 207.241.237.3 If not using that IP, then will not necessarily hit CAPTCHA.

One can switch to another address that works without CAPTCHA, such as 185.101.35.175

Until it too has problems; only a matter of time

I am not hitting any captcha.

On the other hand, the internet archive offers the same service with better credentials

web.archive.org

There’s more than this, though.

...wait, there is? It's not in the archive.is link!

WSJ probably updated the article. Here's the newer link: https://archive.is/20250501040217/https://www.wsj.com/tech/a...

Makes sense. The original link says “updates to follow as news develop” at the bottom. And I guess they really meant that – that they were planning on expanding on it already when they first published the initial, short version of it.

The court decision is worth the read, you can skip all articles.

Apple News+ link: https://apple.news/AlNSjMktVT9afQICM2yRVYw

nice ty. i always have so much trouble finding these links but i have Apple News+. is there an easy way to do it? i always have to manually go through issues.

In Safari you can hit the Share button at the bottom then pick News.

Odd. That is not there for me and I cannot add it :( I have the same problem as OP. I wish it were simple.

The “News” icon (to open a paywalled article in Apple News) only appears in the Share sheet in Safari.app proper.

It’s a bit amusing to me that this sounds like another, different anti-trust issue. Apple’s browser having this feature, which other browser vendors (presumably) can’t add, to open another app would also look bad to an EU judge.

Usually if the article is on Apple News+ it will come up if you search the headline on the “following” tab

why do we want an apple link that just redirects to the original article? is this just "look at me i'm a mac user" levels of spam?

I believe this is a way to use their own apple news subscription to access the article instead of using the archive version: It only redirects if you're not logged in to apple news.

So it's spam in the eyes of everyone who doesn't happen to subscribe to their service of choice? If they want to read an article through their news app they are of course free to do so, but why spam that link?

I’m sorry for posting it.

Is it really spam if it was posted a single time? Just downvote it and collapse the thread if you don't want to see it.

And flag it, bc it's a no value ad.

If someone submit a Spotify link as an HN submission, I'd hope that's flagged for spam too.

Apple News+ is a bundle subscription to many otherwise paywalled newspapers, so people who have it can read it through there.

If you view it on an Apple device, it takes you to the Apple News app and opens it there, rather than redirecting.

[flagged]

Finally vindicated! For years we were arguing with the Apple fanboys here on HN about what Apple is doing and how it is wrong, immoral and illegal. Glad to see something starting to happen.

I just wonder what are the next excuses going to be?

The judge should slap them in the wrist! Just like last time. Served them well...

Groundbreaking.

We just released Crosspay, a cross-platform in-app subscriptions SDK for iOS, Android, macOS, Linux, Windows, and Web apps, enabling users to purchase subscriptions once, and use anywhere. As this ruling becomes effective, we will also enable users to choose their payment method on any platform, instead of being tied to Apple App Store.

However, apps that charge $1 or less per transaction will continue to pay over 30% in fees (e.g. Stripe charges 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction)

See more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43714552

I vouched this comment because I found it genuinely helpful, I was looking for cross payment service for my apps that work across all platforms (they're in Flutter, do you support that?).

This is huge, because it means that anyone buying an iPhone or apple product going forward is knowingly supporting this behaviour. I fully expect this to be the ruin of Apple.

This seems like a bit of a reach tbh. It's no doubt hopefully huge, but by buying a product you're not implicitly agreeing with every or any element of internal company politics that occured during its production. I buy Macbooks because I tend to like most aspects of them, but use mostly Pixel phones, does that mean I support literally anything Tim Cook or leadership does to produce anything else? Not really, I just use the tools that work for me.

If that's the bar you're setting nobody would buy Microsoft or Google since they also got convicted of monopolistic practices.

Apple is still a hardware company. A loss of revenue from software and services sales is far from ruinous for Apple.

What is the magic information dissemination service that guarantees that every future customer knows?

This is human communication. If you make an ethics-based decision and communicate that with friends or family, they then have to make the conscious choice to continue supporting the business with this practice or seek alternatives. People who care about humans will support businesses that care about humans.

> I fully expect this to be the ruin of Apple.

Apple products are status products. Especially in the USA.

No one will care.