I'd be more okay with HN's "poor weak countries and their regulations are the only things standing in the way of mighty Apple" contingent if it weren't for incredibly predictable things like this.
There is no good guy. I trust Apple as far as their interests align with mine. I trust my country as far as I have a say in its politics. Of course there are many companies just as powerful as Apple whose interests have nothing or almost nothing in common with mine, and my country has a lot of people voting for stupid people. And I have zero confidence in the UK collectively to do anything sensible at this point.
All this to say, sometimes I think Apple is on the good side, and sometimes not. That’s normal, the world is not black and white.
Like Apple's measures to prevent tracking people from apps out across the internet, because they value privacy and don't want their users to be tracked.
Unless you want to take payments via an external link to a webpage, in which case you are now required by Apple to track users of your website so that you can pay them 27% of any purchases someone makes for a week after clicking that link.
You know, the same thing Facebook and other advertisers were doing. Which was bad. But now that Apple is the one making money off of it, actually it's fine.
> Like Apple's measures to prevent tracking people from apps out across the internet, because they value privacy and don't want their users to be tracked.
You misunderstand or misrepresent their policy. Tracking across apps is exactly that. It’s designed to limit data harvesters, 3rd-party analytics libraries that build individuals’ profiles by following them across several unrelated apps.
This is entirely unrelated to a company linking accounts between their apps and their website, which is entirely uncontroversial and has been for as long as there have been apps on iPhones. I mean, how else is a Gmail app supposed to be consistent with the website?
It’s been the same thing since forever with the Amazon and Netflix apps, as well.
> You know, the same thing Facebook and other advertisers were doing. Which was bad. But now that Apple is the one making money off of it, actually it's fine.
Facebook is harvesting data across apps and websites indiscriminately and without the subjects’ consent. It’s completely disingenuous to say that this is equivalent to Spotify knowing what the users do in their app and in their website.
If I don’t have a Spotify account, Spotify does not know a thing about me. That is not the case for Facebook.
> This is entirely unrelated to a company linking accounts between their apps and their website, which is entirely uncontroversial and has been for as long as there have been apps on iPhones. I mean, how else is a Gmail app supposed to be consistent with the website?
The policy applies whether or not your app uses accounts. Software licensing can be as simple as "you pay us, we email you a link which will launch the app and apply your license key." But not if you're using this new special linking flow.
If someone clicks the purchase button in your app to go to your website, decides not to purchase it, then 6 days later they navigate back to your website from Google or a link that a friend sent them and they decide to buy it that time, Apple will expect you to have tracked that they used the in-app link a week ago so that you can pay them. You might prefer not to track customers browsing your website (for example, you might avoid using cookies so that you aren't required to plaster a cookie consent banner on every page) but Apple says too bad.
How will Apple enforce this? I have no idea. But to get permission to use external purchase links you have to agree to pay Apple 27% on purchases with 7 days of clicking it and give Apple permission to audit your accounting of those purchases.
Its poorer and weaker than it was. widespread inequality, almost fifteen years of domestic austerity, brexit, widespread regulatory capture, privatisations and crumbling infrastructure, huge reductions in state capability (especially military), delusional nostalgic nationalist politics, three decades of getting involved in disastrous and/or illegal wars.
This sounds a lot like the US as well. I lived in London and Surrey County as a kid. Since brexit I ask my friends so you decided to Londonize your whole country as that seems like the only viable path forward. I use a lot of British software, Nuke, Affinity, HDR Light Studio and I can see more of it develop. That said has to be painful to deal the austerity (which is wild as the UK still runs a deficit).
