Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
I wish that the EU would actually articulate what they want specifically instead of playing this game where they tell companies to do something, they do it, and then they complain that it isn’t good enough.
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Well Apple is supposed to be INNOVATING, and you don’t want a government telling companies what innovation looks like. The initial idea is to set the rules, and hope “the gatekeepers” can find innovative ways to stay within them. If they fail to satisfy the rules, then fines can apply and they discuss if they want a do-over.
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Sure, but if they pass a law, it isn’t too much to ask for them to articulate how one follows that law. I don’t understand how anyone is expected to hit a constantly moving target. Regulating by definition means that they do want to tell them what innovation looks like.
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They do say what they want, the problem is, the companies try and find weasel ways out of complying, whilst not attracting fines…
I really wish that @Leo would have EU based guests on, when discussing this sort of topic. Having Alex and Co. saying this is just big business and telling us Europeans that we don’t want this anyway is incredibly annoying and frustrating. This isn’t about big business, this is about choice for us users. Big business might have also spoken to the EU Parliament to help get this rolling, but it isn’t just big business.
Also, the Apple AI announcement sounds like pettiness to me. If they were actually serious about this, they would have said that they were in talks with the regulator to find out a) whether the product falls under DMA and b) if it does fall under DMA, what implications does it have?
If they had said that, I would have believed them.
If their aim was to get people to be upset with the EU and complaining, I think it might have backfired, all I want to do is give Tim a big kick in the arse to try and jump start his brain!
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Apple getting slapped around by the EU is fun to see.
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I was listening to this episode wearing headphones and I couldn’t help but be distracted by people not muting their mic while making noise. It’s very distracting hearing iPhone keyboard clicks while someone is talking. Not only is it distracting, but it kind of comes off as rude because my impression was that it was Alex, and Alex was kind of talking over Andy.
Alex is very off base on what is good for users. I get what he means by saying the people don’t want to have to go to a 3rd party source to get the netflix app; but I think the users are smart enough to just go to netflix.com if the app disappeared.
EDIT: I’m not as convinced as I was earlier on whom was making the iPhone click sounds, as I was watching a 5 month old episode of TWiG which had the same thing. I suspect maybe it’s the producer, but I wasn’t trying to point fingers at someone. I just find it distracting.
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Also, it doesn’t have to disappear , it could be in the main store and other stores and it is the user’s choice whether they want to buy it from Apple or a third party.
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Isnt that Alex’s concern? If we actually had competing app stores then why would Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe etc. want to give Apple a cut? They’d rather use their own store only and keep the money.
But that’s already what I do, and it’s a non-issue to me. I pay for O365, Prime, Luminar, Netflix. I pay all these directly to those companies and have no problems.
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For me, it is more Audible and Kindle books in the Audible and Amazon apps… I would enter into a transaction with Amazon, with whom I have a payment relationship, I would order it through Amazon, not touching the Apple network and the Kindle book, for example, would be delivered to my Kindle Voyager, again not touching the Apple network, but I can’t, because Apple wants its 30% for nothing… But if I buy the same book in paper form, that is different, I can do that… 
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I completely agree with you. I would also like to see the source for Alex’s (and others) statistics when they say X-% of people don’t want something or do want something,
And there’s always the danger that “my perspective” is the one shared by most people. Whenever I hear someone say “no one I know” or “everyone I know”, I wonder about the sample size of that group. Because I’m willing to bet the Venn diagram of people I know and people Alex knows has virtually no overlap.
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One of the biggest issues, for me, that makes no sense, is the fact that if an app is in a 3rd party store - it cannot be in the Apple App Store. I find that constraint to be absolutely ridiculous.
On the Android side of things - I have a Samsung tablet. When Google required Amazon to remove the ability to buy books from the Play Store version of Kindle, I was able to download Kindle from the Samsung store and keep that functionality. That’s what competition looks like - and those are free apps. But Apple’s dumb requirement that an app can only be available from one store at a time is just that: dumb.
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Yes - that’s a good example of competing stores. Works with Prime Video and Audible too. If you get the app from the Galaxy Store, you can still purchase stuff within the app as their store rules are different.
I can see what Alex is getting at though. Stores on macOS and Windows are annoying IMO, and if the iPhone went the same way it’s more friction.
Using Luminar as an example, it’s on macOS and Windows stores. You download it and install. Open the app, and it doesn’t work without a subscription. So you go off to the Skylum website to purchase that, get an ID, which then unlocks the app. If you ignore the app store, Skylum has a 7-day trial you can download to try it before you buy. But the app stores don’t allow trials. Gets messy.
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On people just using a VPN and getting around any regional differences, companies do seem to be getting stricter. Just a VPN won’t do it.
My Garmin watch, for example, has health features, like the ECG, that are only approved and available in the US. No probs I thought, I’ll just VPN and enable it. Didn’t work.
I ended up having to do 3 things - set my location to USA in my Garmin account, use a GPS spoofer on my phone to ‘move’ me to CA, VPN and then the ECG functionality appeared.
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I am with Alex 100% on this. This is my opinion, right or wrong. EVERYONE has choices. If you don’t want to be in Apple’s system, buy another phone brand. I can’t go to Chevy and buy a car, but TELL Chevy, I want a Ford Engine, with Ferrari suspension. If I don’t like what Chevy has to offer, I buy something else.
This would never happen, but Apple should just shutter all its EU stores and not sell their products in the EU. The fines they want to impose is more than they make selling in the EU.
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No, but you can buy a Chevy and put Conti tyres on it, you don’t have to go to the Chevy dealership to change the tyres and you don’t pay Chevy 30% of the cost of those tyres…
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Absolutely!
I can drive a Chevy car on any road out there. I don’t need to buy a different car if I want to drive in Cupertino vs. if I want to drive in Los Angelos. My aftermarket sound system will work just as fine in my Toyota as it does in my Hyundai.
This whole mindset of Apple: Love it or Leave It is bad,
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It is hard to believe that the EU’s approach to regulation and competition has not contributed to the US economy growing faster the the EU’s for the last 30 years.
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I don’t understand what you mean by “weasel ways”. Are you saying the law is not specific enough?
Nice to hear Jason push back on Alex’s bogus claim about the tvOS app store. It’s no different from the iOS App store. The nature of those apps require an outside account for multi platform support. Plus the AppleTV doesn’t integrate with iCloud Passwords.
Alex isn’t wrong. It’s mostly a fight between millionaires and billionaires. But why can’t you subscribe to a streaming app like other apps? Because Apple feels it deserves 30%. But that doesn’t work the same as a regular app subscription, because effectively the streamers are middlemen to the content makers. 30% is a huge cut to a second middleman.
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