But there is a difference between “illegal to regurgitate it” and “illegal to remember it”. IIRC in this case that settled the judge had ruled on “remember” (fair use) but not on the other.
As described in the ruling, Apple hired a consulting group to estimate how much value developers get from the iphone platform, which found that
(1) Apple’s platform technology is worth up to 30% of a developer’s revenue.
(2) Apple’s developer tools and services are worth approximately 3%–16%.
(3) Apple’s distribution services are worth approximately 4%–14%.
(4) Apple’s discovery services are worth approximately 5%–14%.
Then Apple claimed this study was how they came up with the 27%, but the Judge basically said nah you guys came up with that number before the study, and you even know it would be a non-starter for almost all developers.
> Apple’s developer tools and services are worth approximately 3%–16%
That must be a joke. Xcode is so bad, compared to Android Studio, it’s not even funny. As iOS dev I have to constantly apologize to my Android team members, that, no, Xcode can’t do this and that, and, no, we can’t do X in the build pipeline. And I‘m generally 10-20% slower than them because the tooling is just terrible and flaky.
BTW there was a promising IntelliJ option for Apple development, but Apple made life so hard for them that they had to give up. It was called „AppCode“ and some people are still sad that it doesn’t exist anymore.
It made me laugh, if you pretend to be worth 30% of revenue (an insane markup), you better really invest in those developer tools to show it off because the sad state of xcode really isn't showing that.
I don't know where this money is going but certainly not in the developer tooling because it's absolutely terrible
If Apple were worth 30% of revenue, then they'd have no problem allowing competing app stores on their devices, because they support their rate with their value.
The fact that they're deadset against competition should tell the courts all they need to know about how competitively supportable the 30% is.
I thought Apple's argument was that the 30% pays for iOS itself, not that the 30% pays for the App Store. Under that theory there's no reason to allow other app stores.
They used to do that back when the iPhone first came out. I don’t think anybody liked that better, and having people hang around on older iOS versions was (and still is) bad for security.
iPhones never had paid iOS upgrades. iPod touch did, but that's because Apple was worried free updates would violate an accounting rule. Specifically, the iPhone was considered subscription revenue while the iPod touch was considered purchase revenue. And after an accounting scandal[0] GAAP had been changed so that you couldn't say you sold, say, a bunch of stuff that hadn't actually been finished yet, and then finish it later with, say, a software update.
This is, of course, how basically every tech company works nowadays[1], because Apple lobbied to have that accounting rule removed.
None of this has anything to do with "App Store pays for iOS". That's an excuse Apple came up with after Epic Games sued them, there's no point in time I can point to where iOS is just the bundled OS vs. "paid for with app sales". The reality is, everything pays for everything, because Apple only sells fully bundled experiences. Their opposition to sideloading or third-party iOS app stores is only somewhat related to security[2], and more related to the fact that they don't want anyone dictating to them how the customer experience is, even if those changes improve the experience.
Well, that, and the fact that they make bank off App Store apps.
Steam takes a 30% cut, but it's actually apparently worth it for discovery and low-friction sales alone, since developers still sell on Steam when the PC is an open platform with competing storefronts with lower cuts.
Steam also reduces their cut down to 25/20% at $10m/$50m in sales, whereas Apple reduces it to 15% only for devs under $1m/yr. A small number of games/apps make the vast majority of revenue so Steam's average cut is likely considerably lower in practice.
> if you pretend to be worth 30% of revenue (an insane markup)
Back in 2008, if you were an indie dev then their 30% ask was more than reasonable because the cost-of-doing-business on other platforms (like Windows Mobile) was much higher due to the lack of any central App Store; for example, you'd often need to partner with a company like Digital River, and pay more for marketing/advertising and overcome the significant friction involved in convincing punters to register/buy from your website, download the app *.cab files to their PC, install the app onto your device, and hope no-one uploads a copy to a filesharing network because this was before the days when an OS itself would employ DRM to enforce a license for third-party software.
...then one day Apple comes along and says: "We can manage all of that for you, for far less than what you'd pay for e-commerce and digital distribution, and our customers have lots of disposable income".
Ostensibly, competition should have come from the Android and (lol) Windows App Stores: "surely if Android's Play Store offers devs better rates then devs will simply not target iOS anymore and Apple will reduce their % to stay competitive" - but Apple's secret-sauce of a markedly more affluent customer base with already saved credit-card details meant that Android apps leant more on ad-supported apps while more iOS apps could charge an up-front amount, not have ads, and result in iOS devs still making far more money on Apple's platform.
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There exists an argument that Apple should not be forced to open-up the iOS platform because Apple is selling a closed platform on the merits of it being a closed platform, and Apple's customers want a closed platform (even if they don't realize it) because having a closed platform looks like the only way to enforce a minimum standard of quality and to keep malware out precisely because normal-human-users (i.e. our collective mothers) will install malware because the installation instructions for "Facebook_Gold_App1_100%_Real_honest.app" tell them to disable system protections.
> because having a closed platform looks like the only way to enforce a minimum standard of quality and to keep malware out precisely because normal-human-users (i.e. our collective mothers) will install malware because the installation instructions
Well no, the most secure platform in 2025 is still the web. You can't get as much data in a web browser as you can in a mobile app and the sandboxing is tighter.
And I may mention that the majority of the appstore revenue comes from casino like games, not really something I would give it to my family.
And sure, I'm opened to the idea that the appstore was innovative in 2008, unfortunately for Apple, we're now in 2025 and it clearly isn't anymore.
> Back in 2008, if you were an indie dev then their 30% ask was more than reasonable because the cost-of-doing-business on other platforms (like Windows Mobile) was much higher due to the lack of any central App Store
The first iPhone indie devs were Mac indie devs who already knew Objective-C and Cocoa and Xcode and paid 0% to Apple on the Mac.
At the time, the Verizon/Qualcomm BREW platform had absurd levels of revenue sharing: Up to 90% (!!!) went to the carrier unless you were big enough to negotiate a specific deal.
2010: "Man, charging people money to install software on a feature-phone they bought is kinda fucked up. Both companies are in the wrong for doing that."
2025: "You don't appreciate how lower publishing fees foster competition, except when there's no fees at all, because that's too competitive for the OEM."
The funny thing is that the companies that stand to benefit the most from this and that move the most money (Netflix, Spotify, Fortnite) need Apple's platform, marketing, and distribution the least.
Indeed. I’d add a fourth category: the medium-to-long tail of ad-infested casino games for children. None of those apps are successful because of the App Store. People don’t generally start at the App Store and go looking for games like this. They are all installed from CPI ads in other ad-infested apps or on websites.
Apple is exactly like a mobster demanding a cut for “protection” — except they’ve designed and controlled the system so well that your business just cannot exist in the first place until your automatic extortion payment system is in place.
They don't. Nobody heard about Netflix and Spotify from randomly browsing App Store(Do people even browse app store feeds to see what to download?). Almost every users of them would likely have searched for it.
Maybe I should have said "_don't_ need Apple's platform, marketing, and distribution" rather than "need Apple's platform, marketing, and distribution the _least_", but I think we agree.
For "discovery" people would have to regularly check the App Store app and read the "today" page. Maybe perhaps Spotify or Netflix will appear there once a year among 15000 stories about games.
Or you mean search? If people search for Spotify/Netflix, they already know about it. And right now Apple will helpfully cover half of the screen with an ad for Gmail if you search for Spotify (and will hide all other Spotify apps like Spotify Kids and Spotify for Creators six screens down)
if you take the high end for all of these points, Apple is claiming 74% of the revenue is thanks to them.
Also, there's a certain level of 'hand-waving' here where if you're developing for iOS you're almost forced to have Apple hardware in the first place to run+test (hell, even Android can be dev'd from almost anything...)
"To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied
under oath"
Yikes. I really thought Apple was going to get away with all their crazy restrictions they came up with after the previous ruling (and maybe they still will, who knows) but this looks pretty bad for them.
"In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate."
I hope this guy gets hit with the full extent of the law. Not because I think he is a bad person, but because allowing individuals to be sheltered by corporations is at the core of why corps do illegal or legally grey things.
The right to forget is about removing personal information from a site, or removing articles about you from search results. An answer to a Stackoverflow question isn't really personal info.
I was responsible for drawing 1/25th of this gif back in the day. There was actually way more tiles created but this is one version that went viral. Crazy to see it still pop up like this every couple of years.
It's fairly accurate though. The preliminary injunction in that case blocked government agencies from even talking to social media companies (though some of that got reversed by the 5th circuit).
I think everything you said was fair, but you also mentioned Twitter being a conservative cesspool, and a lot these features like federation and composable moderation are designed to help prevent the whole "rich guy buys the company and turns it into something you don't like" scenario.
I don't see how - I'm not sure how Bluesky works but there must be moderation - otherwise the whole website would succumb to bots and gorespam, so there are people in charge who decide what you get to see.
If the end result is politically unbiased, it's due to their conscious decisions, not some magic algorithm.
It's really unfortunate that the tech companies set the precedent in the first place by pushing hard political agendas into their policies and moderation biases. If it was truly neutral in the first place we would not be having this conversation. All the people complaining only now about Twitter doing this are part of the problem.
Of course people are going to complain about content they don't want. That's the product. Twitter changed their product to deliver different content, so its audience has changed.
Calling it 'The Problem' like climate change or the national debt gives it too much power. Just use something else. People use group chats for real relationships now anyway.
There is no "true neutral" when it comes to moderation. There are a million examples, but the most obvious are of the form "you can have group X or people who hate group X and are dedicated to driving them off the platform". Somebody's not going to have "free speech" in that case. And even if you go for what most "true neutral" advocates want, which is a lack of rules, you'll quickly find that quite a lot of people don't want to hang out at the place that's filled with Nazis or scam artists or spammers or whatever.
True neutral means moderating consistently, judging behavior without regard to identity.
The ideal, platonic version of this would be that moderators only see an "identity scrambled" version of each tweet/post when they make their moderation decision. Like a screen that blinds orchestra musicians when they audition, the human would see a statement like "I hate New Yorkers" and not know if the original message said "I hate New Yorkers" or "I hate Floridians." So they would have to make a decision based on the general principle of whether a statement of this form is allowable.
Anywhere you want to draw the line is fine with me, as long as you draw it consistently.
That sounds like a very personal definition of "true neutral". And also an unworkable one.
Take the use of reclaimed slurs, for example. When used against the discriminated group by a dominant group, their intention is often to cause harm. When used within the group, the intention is to reappropriate the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation
Similarly, harassers will use terms in ways that are plausibly read different ways depending on who they're talking to. So something that might sound innocuous or just odd when directed at me will be correctly read as a racist attack when directed at somebody else.
And that's not even counting when they'll just come up with new terms so they can be awful in ways that are novel enough that automated filters or out-of-date moderators won't catch. E.g.: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bv88a5/white-supremacists-ha...
In short, because there's a great deal of identity-based hate in the world, identity-blind moderation ends up being an aid to the identity haters out there.
The element of moderation that you consider essential -- the latitude to apply subjective judgments that rely on knowing the specific identities of the participants -- is precisely the element that I do not trust moderators to perform.
That this moderation strategy would prevent the use of all slurs (even reappropriated ones) sounds like a feature to me, not a bug.
"That this moderation strategy would prevent the use of all slurs (even reappropriated ones) sounds like a feature to me, not a bug."
You're proposing erring on the side of censorship to avoid some gray areas. While this is a reasonable position, it doesn't satisfy some ideal of neutrality and won't really avoid the gray areas, and so still would require subjective judgement.
For sure. While at the same time allowing the more clever variety of abuser to sail on past.
In practice, almost any nominally "neutral" position ends up allowing an enormous amount of abuse. Which is why you'll see most platforms that start with a free-speech maximalism approach coming up with a lot of nuance and exceptions over time. And those that don't turn into cesspools.
Most people are pretty great, but moderation has to be built for the worst-case attacker.
If detecting abuse requires knowing the identities of the people involved, it sounds like another way of saying that some behaviors are fine if they are directed at certain people, but "abuse" if directed at other people.
No, I'm proposing erring on the side of consistency. I think it's likely that this strategy would result in less "censorship" in some cases, and more in others.
What we have now is a system where, on many platforms, moderators often put their thumbs on the scale and decide that certain groups need more protection than others. Generalizing about or disparaging certain groups is ok, but the sensitivities of other groups are considered sacrosanct and must be deferred to.
Like I said, draw the line anywhere you like. If it applies to everyone equally, I am happy. I am fine with things that require subjective judgment, as long as that subjective judgment is behind a screen that conceals identity.
And also “what’s a slur” alone is very subjective.
For instance on Twitter Elon has decided “cis” and “cisgender” are slurs, but “trans” and “transgender” aren’t. But in gender discussions the terms come up all the time, and they are just terms.
Moderation is full of gray areas, and they are unavoidable.
