
Securing Lasting Freedoms for All - chj
https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/fortnite-mega-drop-faq
======
sillysaurusx
I take a cynical view here: the only reason Epic is doing this is to make more
money. They want that last 30%. i.e. this is a PR stunt and nothing more.

You can feel various ways, but personally, my reaction is "This is the hill
you want to die on? You won't win this. No judge will ever order Apple to let
you participate in their app store in violation of their ToS. And if they do,
it'll take years of litigation."

Still... Kudos to them for this ambitious plan. It takes guts to intentionally
kill off your iOS revenue stream. I wonder what percentage of revenue fortnite
iOS generated. Perhaps iOS simply wasn't too lucrative. But if it was
lucrative, then this took guts.

Remember that struggles for money and power are often dressed up as struggles
for morals and righteousness. You start to see that pattern everywhere.

The other side of this is, Apple needs to play this carefully. It has the
potential to quickly spiral out of control. For example, banning all games
built on Unreal Engine would ignite a real fury, and would make
[http://paulgraham.com/apple.html](http://paulgraham.com/apple.html) true – 11
years later.

Removing notarization for Fortnite on MacOS is another overstep, but it
doesn't seem like it will cause Apple to lose the war.

~~~
mewse
“That last 30%” is kind of a funny phrase. If you were saying “That last 5%” I
would probably agree with your take. But 30% is a massive chunk of the profit
of every company in that whole market.

30% isn’t “that last”; it’s a substantial chunk of the money generated by the
product you’ve spent years making, and I have trouble mustering your apparent
disdain for anybody that would by so gauche as to expend energy trying to
recover it.

~~~
michannne
Yeah, I understand that platforms like Steam also take huge chunks, even
Amazon, for hosting, providing visibility and other such features. Still, 1/3
of my revenue is _ALOT_ of money

~~~
Andrew_nenakhov
Steam takes their cut for being the most convenient way to buy games, which
drives sales, and developers are happy to be there. Apple take their cut
because nobody has a choice, other than not to buy Apple devices. First is a
honest partnership, second is extortion.

------
jfmercer
Isn't "securing lasting freedoms for all" a hyperbolic title for this issue?

~~~
all_blue_chucks
"Reducing our payment processing costs" doesn't have quite the same ring to
it.

~~~
metiscus
Having the potential to restore general purpose computing to a device I own is
a noble cause even if the standard bearers are an unpleasant bunch.

~~~
happytoexplain
Restoring general purpose computing is so immensely removed from allowing 3rd
party payments on a regulated software market, I would hesitate to even call
it a step in the right direction.

~~~
metiscus
It is in the pantheon of possible solutions to the crisis. We know for fairly
certain epic wants their own store on iOS. That does move the needle
significantly.

------
Waterluvian
Epic wants more money. Watching them raise the banner of freedom makes me want
to vomit a little. But Apple’s 30% take is ludicrous and the enemy of my enemy
is my friend so I really hope they prevail.

~~~
freedomben
> _Watching them raise the banner of freedom makes me want to vomit a little._

I agree they probably have ulterior motives, but I will always welcome people
to the banner of freedom whenever they are willing to hold it. Even though
they are arguing for freedom because of the potential profit, it doesn't
change the importance of the freedom.

------
superkuh
Tell it to the people who used to play Rocket League on linux.

~~~
Pxl_Buzzard
Tell them what exactly? That's a case of a developer not wanting to continue
maintaining an app on the platform. And thankfully WINE and Proton are able to
pick up the slack and make the game playable without the support of the devs.
Epic still wants to publish Fortnite on iOS, presumably, and in the meantime
there isn't a way for them to do so without returning to the 30% cut.

~~~
superkuh
> developer not wanting to continue maintaining an app on the platform.

This isn't what happened. Psyonix was perfectly happy with it and continued to
expand and engage the wider PC gaming and modding community. Then Epic bought
them for Rocket League's userbase and things reversed after the period of
false assurances that nothing would change.

Epic is just a broken clock being right twice a day. Yes, what they're arguing
for is sensible. But pretending that they're doing it to "Secure Freedoms for
All" is absurd.

------
lajawfe
Here I give my analysis of what the best solution could be. Would like to know
your thoughts too.

0\. Lower rate from 30% to 15% -Apple still has monopoly, nothing changes.

1\. Side loading apps: Not good! malicious apps can run amok, eg. $BIG_CORP$
will say - you will get 20$ credits if you sideload our app, and then surveil
everything that is possible on the device. Here, we expect an average user to
give all the permission that the app requests for.

2\. allow secondary app stores: -not good as it depends on the quality of
enforcement in secondary app store. For Apple, it is in their interest to
maintain app quality in their appstore to maintain overall good user
experience in their device, but motivations are not same for secondary app
store. May allow malicious apps which deteriorate the user experience/privacy
similar to 1. And there will be a state where you will have to install 10s of
app store just to install specific programs which is also not ideal.

3\. Allow secondary payment methods: -Average user will have to give up their
payment info to everyone who asks for it. Most of them will not be trustworthy
nor we can expect all of them to maintain good security standards for saving
payment info.

The biggest culprit of all this drama is Apple does not allow secondary
payment inside apps AND also, if you have secondary payment outside of app,
they do not allow that price to be lower. There is no competition, thus Apple
can get away with whatever it chooses to. Thus the monopoly.

4\. SOLUTION:

a) charge a flat fee for reviewing/serving apps. If necessary, linearly
increase it based on daily active users if they need more resource to support
that app.

b) allow whitelisted secondary payment providers. Only whitelisting few
payment methods which are trustable eg applepay, googlepay, paypal, stripe,
etc will maintain security of payment data.

c) allow secondary payment price to be lower than Apple.

With this solution, there will be competition between payment providers which
will drive the price down.

~~~
Polylactic_acid
Side loading apps would not and does not have to be bad. iOS is protected by
technical restrictions as well as ToS restrictions. A sideloaded app would not
be able to grab your gps and contact list without requesting permission
because those are technical restrictions. It would however be able to show
adult content and 3rd party payment processing because those are ToS
protections.

~~~
FridgeSeal
When I worked in ad tech I, I was tangentially a part of a project where we
were working with a sister company to integrate in their app to enable data
collection.

My work wished to use fine-grained location and there was concern that our
integration and usage of the gps API's in an app that didn't otherwise have a
good reason to use them would cause it to be rejected (apparently this had
happened before). I don't know for certain whether this ended up being the
case, but I would certainly believe it. If there was a 2nd App Store that
didn't enforce standards in the same way as the Apple run-store, I absolutely
believe ad-tech companies would go to lengths to push clients to using it so
they could vacuum up more data.

~~~
Polylactic_acid
Android has had sideloading for like a decade and no major app is installed
via sideloading. Its entirely used for beginner developers, open source repos
and piracy. The inconvenience of being out of store is bigger than the
benefits of being in store. I think ultimately epic does not want the solution
to be sideloading since they are having the same issues on android. They want
to be on the app store and to have no fees.

------
aaronbrethorst
_We are committed to securing lasting freedoms for all. This is why we fight._

This seems so out of touch given what's happening in the United States and
around the world today.

------
enchiridion
I understand the disgust some people are expressing, but I can't really
sympathize with it.

It seems like a case of aligned incentives.

------
ndarilek
This is a surprisingly personal legal battle for me.

I'm totally blind. For a long while now, iOS has been the mobile accessibility
leader, and unless you as a blind person have some specific reason to use
Android, you're encouraged to use iOS.

Back in 2009 when Android accessibility was a joke, by which I mean as a
developer I found major API issues within a few hours of development, I wrote
one of the first and most popular Android screen readers. I think it was at
least the first to be publicised even before TalkBack, where by "publicised" I
mean TalkBack wasn't in Android's release notes, but I at least had an APK
installable via tinyurl and posted to a mailing list. I quite literally had
nothing else to do with my time at that point in my life, and Android 1.6 had
an accessibility API, so on a lark I started writing a screen reader. The
project has since died out, but for a long while, Spiel was a thin on Android.

iOS won't let me do anything like that. Further, iOS won't even let me code
for it unless I use MacOS, and while MacOS has some decent accessibility
features, it's been a royal pain in my ass to code on. I could elaborate, but
to keep this comment brief, take it as a given from a subject area expert that
developing on MacOS as a blind person is worse than any other platform I've
used to date. And that's saying something, since Linux is my primary platform,
and there are a number of blind developers who won't touch it with a 10-foot
pole. I don't want to claim that coding on MacOS under VoiceOver isn't
possible, but it's more difficult than it needs to be.

Yes, these are two huge corporations slugging it out, and it's hard to muster
much sympathy for Epic. But I wouldn't be the developer I am today if it
weren't for Android's openness letting me build a screen reader, and its
further openness letting me build an accessible GPS navigation app which I've
hacked on in some form for around a decade now, and which I've come to rely
upon. It bugs me to no end that the more accessible mobile platform is so
locked down such that a budding blind software engineer handed an iPhone can't
code for it using JAWS or NVDA. So Apple is handing blind people internet-
connected mobile computers with all sorts of sensors, and telling them the
only way they can develop for these devices is by using a sub-par development
environment that's going to fight them every step of the way and, likely, turn
them off of software development more broadly. Then maybe we wonder why we
don't see more blind software engineers?

So, go Epic. If they start being asses later then of course I'll oppose that,
but if they have a big enough saber to start breaking up Apple's stranglehold
on the most accessible mobile platform, they've got my support 100%. Hell
yeah, the web wouldn't have been possible under Apple's rule. And while I
respect those of you who want more secure devices and a curated experience,
don't under-estimate the harm caused by locking blind developers out of one of
the most accessible computing environments they're ever likely to get. No,
jumping through certificate hoops to install something that will expire after
a week isn't anything near what I'm asking for.

And to those of you who say "Just tell your blind friends to use a Pinephone,"
I wish I could, but Linux accessibility infrastructure has no support for
touchscreens and touch events. Any of you millionaires reading this interested
in funding that development? ;) Serious question, I'll work to put you in
touch with the right folks.

------
Andrew_nenakhov
If Epic pulls this off and Apple will be forced to allow app sideloading and
third party appstores, I pledge myself to install Epic Store on some of my
desktop computers.

------
happytoexplain
This is one immoral company fighting another for money and simply hoping
people will see the other as more immoral.

There's something disgusting about their technique of preparing a propaganda
film portraying themselves (a massive corporation) as the courageous underdog
representing the people, then purposefully breaking ToS for the purposes of
provoking the obvious reaction which they could then "react" to by releasing
the film.

Of course all of this is independent of Apple's actual sin, which is indeed an
overbearing ToS.

~~~
TedDoesntTalk
They broke the TOS so Apple would block the app, which then gives them
standing in court. Without standing, any judge would dismiss their case.

~~~
happytoexplain
A fair point for legal pragmatism, though it doesn't affect my opinion of
their character.

~~~
stefan_
Ah yes, the sanctity of the _ToS_ was violated. My heart bleeds.

~~~
happytoexplain
Why the snark? I certainly said more than "they violated the ToS", which I
even explicitly stated was an overbearing ToS.

------
TedDoesntTalk
> Apple’s policies would have even blocked the World Wide Web if it had been
> invented after the iPhone, because Apple policies disallow running code not
> reviewed by Apple, accepting payments directly from customers, and accessing
> content not reviewed by Apple — all fundamental features of the web

YES!

------
bassman9000
This argument will be useful next time a brick and mortar store tells me they
only take cash.

