As a v1 user, I’m confused about the payment options. From reading the blog post, it seems a new user could choose to either pay once for lifetime access, or pay yearly. However, since I’ve been given the upgrade and 1 year of membership for free, I don’t see the lifetime option. Presumably the discounted lifetime price will no longer be available by the time my 1 year runs out. How can I lock in the discounted price now?
That might help if he actually knew anything about technology though...
> "The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer," Milton said. "That's the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let's us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. It's not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to communicate."
Why would they struggle to maintain Unreal Engine? The developer tools/SDKs are free to download and you don’t need a developer account for that. All they will lose is access to pre-release tools such as betas or the Apple Silicon transition kit. It just means they might not have a release ready on launch day, but should be fine after that as the tools are made public.
You can't even run a hello world app on iOS device without signing it with a developer account, and the restraining order that blocks apple from terminating epic international's developer account is just temporary. There is still chance that epic will lose developer account needed for developing unreal engine. You can run unsigned code on iOS simulator, but the simulator lacks many api and can't replace running on real devices (unlike Android emulator that can emulate almost everything a real device does).
No, on Android you can sideload anything. (Do you not use smartphones at all? How do you not know this?)
This hasn't been true for iOS either for the last N years, AFAIK you can sign apps for free to load on your devices, but the signatures are valid only for a week, so you have to reload the apps at least every week.
> AFAIK you can sign apps for free to load on your devices, but the signatures are valid only for a week, so you have to reload the apps at least every week.
Guess where the key required for signing the binary comes from? That's right, it comes from your apple developer account, automatically downloaded and provisioned by xcode when you hit the build button. Without a developer account you won't have any valid key to sign the build, even for debug build. Afaik the only way to skip this is to jailbreak your device so it can run unsigned binary.
The theory was that apple might revoke their ability to use the developer tools/SDKs (Broadly, this is what was stated in the letter saying their developer account would be revoked, even though you don’t need a paid developer account to download some of that stuff).
Xcode, the SDKs, etc. are licensed, not open source, and probably contain clauses allowing apple to terminate the license.
> For example Apple demand that app developers price their apps in the app store similar to the same service in other stores (website, Google play store, etc), even though they are taking a huge 30% cut. So Spotify can't price their product 30% more expensive in the app store
False. You can price your app/IAP higher, you just can't tell the user it's cheaper elsewhere.
There is a difference between information asymmetry existing and deliberately creating one.
I don't think anyone should be allowed to use their market position to do that.
With regards to typical retail, I think that's a bit of a wonky analogy as it's not a competitor in this case, it's the company themselves. That being said, things like that have been done. Not exactly the same but in the same spirit is printing the "retail price" on the box to prevent 3rd party sellers from just charging whatever they want.
> You just can't mention that fact in your iOS app.
And you don't think that is anti-competitive? Apple is free to promote their own services on their platform that compete with others, require them to pay a 30% tax that their own competing service does, and the only escape hatch they give you is "you can use the web, but you can't tell your users"
Am I taking crazy pills, or do other people think this is absurd.
The first rule of alternative signup models on the App Store is, you don't talk about alternative signup models.
Of course it is absurd. But a lot of people have no idea what this is even all about.
A large part of the internet is screaming "The evil Epic brought this upon themselves, if they don't want to pay 30 %, then don't use iOS!"
Apple increases costs for users, just because they bought an iOS device. Thats definetly not good for consumers.
But what are developers going to do about it? For some developers, over 2/3 of their customers are on a iOS device, so just not using the App Store is not a realistic option. Apple has also made sure that the App Store is the only possible way.
So, it's way to big to ignore, and there is definetly no competition. Clearly something has to happen. I would also love to be able to use a decent browser like Firefox or Chrome on iOS(not the current webkit crap apple forces mozilla and Google to use).
There will be fewer companies able to afford ads to drive installs for their apps.
IDFA trades privacy for market efficiency. It's used by ad networks to allow me to optimize for either the cheapest or most valuable installs, and validate that my marketing spend is actually driving these behaviors with an acceptable ROI.
Without it, ad networks will be much less effective and it will cost developers at least 2x to drive the same number of installs.
IDFA has obvious privacy flaws, but Apple is making a mistake by crippling it without offering a privacy-safe alternative (and several of those have been proposed by the industry).
Driving installs is a giant business that also needs to die. At a previous employer we took one small app we had maybe at #150 in travel in the App Store. We paid $10K to some app install driver company as a test. I watched as people in countries we did no business in downloaded the app in droves and pushed it to #1 in travel in 24hrs - then the money ran out and we were back at #150 in a couple of days.
The company that we were sold to by our parent company did the same thing on a regular basis and kept their main app in the top 5 for years. Not sure if they do it today (this was 6+ years ago).
I wish Apple would find a way to stop these artificial App Store hacks (maybe they have I no longer pay much attention since our app's downloads do not affect our business).
Here are the working proposals for the privacy-safe replacements for 3rd-party cookies on web. This conversation has been happening in public for over a year. Mobile will likely follow similar solutions, but Apple accelerated the timeline of IDFA deprecation and caught the industry off guard. https://github.com/w3c/web-advertising
That's exactly what this recall is meant to address: that the eMMC is aging faster than what is reasonable.