• reddig33@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    The Verge has such a hard on for this story. They’ve published like ten articles about it already.

    • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      To be fair, it’s the most interesting story the verge has covered in about, well, as long as the verge has existed.

      This is a big deal - it’s going to shape the entire tech industry for the foreseeable future. And it’s going to drag on in court and probably also congress for years and years.

      Apple is the target of the lawsuit but the DoJ is also telling every other tech company what rules they need to operate under. The last decade of “just do whatever you want” is over.

      • vinyl@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        They have an entire story covering the US v Microsoft case. You should give it a read.

    • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      Because we all do, because someone is finally trying to do something about Apple’s decades long walled garden anti-competitive bullshit.

      What, are you upset that your favourite trillion dollar mega corp feels picked on?

      • kirklennon@kbin.social
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        3 months ago

        I’m upset when the government wastes resources on a big lawsuit that it’s absolutely going to lose, because it’s weak on the law and inept on the not-that-complicated technological issues. I also question the leadership of an organization that, in the name of consumer protection, decides to target a product with ludicrously high customer satisfaction ratings. Consumers love their iPhones, perhaps more so than literally any other product they own. What a monumentally stupid target.

        • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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          3 months ago

          “I like my iPhone so any criticism of Apple has to be unjustified”

          Your reasoning is weak, do better.

        • DingoBilly@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Yikes. You don’t have to defend Apple in public my man, they have lawyers for that.

        • metaldream@sopuli.xyz
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          3 months ago

          You do realize that you can like iPhones and Apple products while recognizing that a lot of Apple’s business practices seriously hurt consumers, right?

          I also don’t think they’ll lose. They have a ton of evidence of intentionally anti-competitive behavior from Apple.

        • root@precious.net
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          3 months ago

          Heroin has a pretty high user satisfaction rating too. You can’t use customer satisfaction as a metric for legality.

    • misk@sopuli.xyz
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      3 months ago

      I expect them to cover this in as much detail as possible. They are probably the last big tech / business news website standing. I know Gizmodo, Engadget, Tech Crunch etc exist but nobody seems to have resources and connections The Verge does.

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Really? I kept getting the feeling they were being sarcastic so I stopped reading

  • RedFox@infosec.pub
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    3 months ago

    Since someone else brought up superapps, do they seem like an initial attempt to get around the manufacturer’s app store lock-in?

    Super apps allow adding mini apps. Seems like an app store.

    The goog/apple app stores are already saturated by malware, I can’t imagine some mini app store would do better. Even if the big two did do a better job, how would they go about vetting all the code these super apps might have access to?

    I guess I’m too jaded, but it seems like just another malware loader you intentionally install.

    Am I being too hard on the concept? Are there any really good ones you’ve used?

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    3 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    United States v. Apple is a lawsuit written for the general public, an 88-page press release designed to be read aloud on cable news shows.

    That’s not against the rules — note that United States v. Google (filed 2023) has a single, terse intro paragraph outside the numbered section — but US v. Apple powers up for two whole pages before getting into allegations.

    There are even a beguiling few paragraphs in which the DOJ compares the need to regularly update AAA video game titles to the onerous process of App Store review and then concludes that “Apple’s conduct made cloud streaming apps so unattractive to users that no developer designed one for the iPhone.” At no point does the DOJ allege that Apple is why I can’t play AAA games on my iPhone….

    (At the Thursday press conference, Attorney General Merrick Garland made no mention of how Sarah Jeong would like to see the SE return to its 2016 size.)

    It’s fun to engage with the legal distillation of nerd rage at the line level, but there’s also an overarching narrative here that the DOJ is trying to push, one with potentially enormous ramifications.

    Meanwhile, the opening volley in its battle against one of America’s favorite companies is a killer start, not least in part because of an unusual degree of lawyerly insight into the human psyche.


    The original article contains 1,258 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • GlitterInfection@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Edit: an upstream comment led me to be able to find this article which does a way better job of explaining the DOJ complaints:

    https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/21/24107669/doj-v-apple-apple-watch-messaging-digital-wallets-lock-in

    Honestly, I would be happy if Apple addressed all of these things as long as doing so has absolutely zero chance of degrading my experience as their customer.

    My original comment:

    Apple already announced that it’ll be supporting RCS sometime this year. Cloud streaming games have been available on iOS for years now, but prior they had to be a Web App and as of earlier this year that is no longer the case. Now they can be a regular app in the app store.

    Superapps are hot garbage and should be banned. But WeChat exists on iPhone so I am honestly confused about this one. What features is it not allowed to have?

    The NFC and wallet issue is a thing still.

    The watch thing is a head scratcher. What API does Apple Watch currently use which 3rd party watches don’t have access to? Because it seems like Apple is being blamed for other companies not making better products.

    • Batbro@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      I’m surprised they didn’t mention that every browser is just re skinned safari

      • GlitterInfection@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Right?

        The complaints that they did list, many aren’t valid anymore. But they didn’t call out a lot of common complaints.

    • nymwit@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      I don’t think you can reply to a text message using a third party watch on iOS but you can with your Apple watch. I’ve seen that cited as an exclusive API.

      • GlitterInfection@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Yes yes. Apple Bad pls upvote me.

        But in this case I pointed out some things that are wrong with the DOJ’s complaints, one thing that is valid, and asked questions about two that nobody, and my searches, have answered. They seem to also be completely wrong on the DOJ side.

        I doubt you use their products or will be affected by them being altered in any way, but I do and will, so this case interests me as do the details.

        • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          I doubt you use their products or will be affected by them being altered in any way

          I use a MacBook pro daily but even if I didn’t major lawsuits against monopolies affect me and everyone else

          • GlitterInfection@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Fortunately for you, this lawsuit doesn’t involve the Mac.

            Fortunately for the rest of us, Apple doesn’t have anywhere near a monopoly in any industry, which is honestly where this case should be dismissed.

            If you have to take a specific month out of the year, limit the region, and define a category as “performance” to get your numbers fudged and you still only get to 70% you’re not exactly making a strong case for a monopoly.

  • nucleative@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Imagine you’re a government lawyer working on the US case and you show up to a deposition and pull your iPhone out set it on the table.

    What are the chances that your Apple ID and iCloud are mysteriously banned for violations of the terms of service for which Apple can’t share the specific reason because of “policy related security reasons” before the week is out?

    • dtrain@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      That’s called “ retaliation” and Apple would have to be pretty fucking stupid to do that to the prosecutors at any point, let alone in the middle of a dep.

      • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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        3 months ago

        Apple would have to pretty fucking stupid to openly retaliate against Epic for criticizing their DMA plan but here we are.

        • AtmaJnana@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Commiting felonies to antagonize a DOJ lawyer personally would be a whole different level of stupid.

          • halva@discuss.tchncs.de
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            3 months ago

            well, it wouldn’t be a felony, they don’t own their apple id lmao

            but it certainly wouldn’t impress neither the prosecution, nor the judge

            • metaldream@sopuli.xyz
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              3 months ago

              The act of retaliation is the part that’s a felony dude, not banning someone’s apple id.

              • AtmaJnana@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago

                NAL, but it would likely be enough for a felony obstruction of justice charge. Add to that, depending on specifics of Apple’s legal response (and whether they throw the employee under the bus,) a CPAA charge for exceeding authorized access in a computer system.

        • HeavyRaptor@lemmy.zip
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          3 months ago

          So this wasn’t exactly retaliation. The first approval epic got this year was from an automated system. Once they got the approval they assumed (very understandably) that apple was okay with them establishing their store within the new guidelines, so they announced their plans publicly. They also continued to diss apple on Twitter of course. Hearing the announcement, Apple execs decided to ban them again because they didn’t adhere to the rules last time.

          This however completely looked like retaliation from apple’s side, so the DMA lawyers started an investigation and Apple had to re-allow epic again.

          Wether it’s apple’s fault for having the shitty automated system or not, doesn’t really matter though. I just hope we get proper sideloading by the end of the process.

          • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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            3 months ago

            No, this was exactly retaliation. Phil Schiller explicitly said in emails that they were removing Epic’s Switzerland’s account because they couldn’t trust them because of how critical their recent comments about the DMA plan were.

          • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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            3 months ago

            So? That doesn’t change how stupid it was to publicly retaliate against them, and explicitly write out that you were punishing them for their criticism. The point is that Apple execs are as dumb as your average person, just greedier.