cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/10062367
Apple Terminated Epic’s Developer Account
Wow, they do this just 2 days after being fined $2 billion by EU!
Unless you don’t know this “Tim Apple”, those fines have a tendency to increase with repeated violations.
$2B on day one. Double that every instance. EU will own Apple in a week or two.
They’ll just stop selling their products in the EU before that bridge is even on the horizon.
Ah yes but those people love money so much, they are probably devastated.🤪
So you wouldn’t mind if 2% of your yearly salary after tax would disappear, right?
There’s no wording in that law that says apple has to allow third party apps for alternate app stores or anything to be made available within apples app store. More like apple just has to allow sideloading. Why would Apple want to pay for the server expense of another company by-passing giving apple a share of the profits?
I hate both companies, but if I owned Apple, I’d be after doing the same thing. Epic can get people to sodeload that crap.
You need an Apple developer account to even make software for iOS. Alternate app stores are distributed on the web, not Apple’s App Store. Since an alternative app store is an iOS app, Apple banning Epic’s developer account means they’re banned from making one.
I hope this come to bite them hard.
Sucks to be an iOS developer. Apple will never give up it’s 30% of your money. EVER.
I took an app development course in college. Everything was android and I tested on my own device, except one project had to be on apple. I managed to snag an ancient iPhone off a friend to test, but no, turns out you need a dev account to even be able to load your own code on your phone. Fuck apple forever.
Dev accounts are free. It’s only when you want to post stuff to the store that you start paying.
How is the $100 a obstacle to any legitimate developer? The only one it hurts is those who would otherwise flood the app store with crap submitted from throw away developer accounts.
Who said anything about legitimacy? I said small, synonyms hobby, FOSS. It is an obstacle to be forced to pay money to Apple for the ‘privelidge’ of being able to install it on their devices. And they are Apple’s devices, you do not own anything you buy from Apple.
Say you you’re maintaining a FOSS app on your own time. How interested would you be to pay Apple $100 annually for the privilege of giving their users free stuff?
When I was in college, I was pulling in just enough money from work to pay for rent, food, essentials, and over drafts from the previous week, that $100 was more than I had available for a good 3-5 years of my life. A college student looking to develop and publish apps is the very type of person most hurt by this.
Everything disproportionately effects the little guy. Just look at laws that have fines instead of jail time. Or just getting a lawyer. Or eating out or buying groceries.
Does it? Steam does not monopolize a platform, or demand exclusivity. With Steam you are 100% free to sell through other channels, and even be able to still use Steam. Also there are actual services on Steam, and there are possibilities for lower rates.
IIRC there are still rules regarding pricing in other platforms if you want to be on steam.
Every other store charges 30% including Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Google Play, etc. Epic doesn’t and they aren’t profitable, so I don’t know why people pile on Apple.
Edit: the downvotes are funny. Why? You don’t like someone pointing out the truth?
This is just a list of shit service providers leeching profits from developers and making the gaming industry worse.
Apple said one of the reasons they terminated our developer account only a few weeks after approving it was because we publicly criticized their proposed DMA compliance plan. Apple cited this X post from this thread written by Tim Sweeney. Apple is retaliating against Epic for speaking out against Apple’s unfair and illegal practices, just as they’ve done to other developers time and time again.
Epic breached the terms of its agreements with Apple and Google to kick off its lawsuits against them in 2020, and now that Sweeney is openly complaining about Apple’s terms for third-party app stores Apple doesn’t trust Epic not to breach those too. Seems reasonable.
Please clarify it to me because I read this debacle as Apple blackmailing developers HARD into not talking bad things about the company. I get they’re evil and petty but I’m having a hard time to believe they’re this childish and stupid, specially with the DMA knocking at their doors.
This isn’t some random developer, it’s a developer that has already breached a contract with Apple. It’s reasonable for Apple to be wary of entering into another contract with them when the CEO is publicly complaining about the terms.
There’s definitely a case to be made that Epic shouldn’t need an Apple developer account to make their own app store, but Apple is well within its rights to deny them an account based on their history.
Epic changed the mobile versions of Fortnite to add an option to pay for V-Bucks through their own system, which is against the terms of both Apple’s app store and Google’s. That got them kicked off of both app stores and then they sued Apple and Google.
Seems reasonable.
Careful. There are quite a few terms of service that you’ve agreed to over the years that if certain aspects of them were enforced, you wouldn’t think they were very reasonable.
I honestly don’t know why there are so many people around here willing to back apple on this kind of shit. Who cares if they had the right to do it? The inherent problem here is that they had that right, when they really shouldn’t.
Careful. There are quite a few terms of service that you’ve agreed to over the years that if certain aspects of them were enforced, you wouldn’t think they were very reasonable.
Epic has an entire legal department to read over agreements like that, and yet they deliberately breached the terms. That’s hugely different from someone unknowingly breaching a TOS that they didn’t read.
