epic vs apple Tim Cook testifies against epic games - epic v apple update

[Bratstech]

Summary

Tim Cook went to the court and did a testimony in person. Tim apples claim is that allowing the sideloading of apps creates risk of all kind of data being vacuumed up by third parties and makes the iPhone insecure. 

“We’re trying to give the customer an integrated solution of hardware, software, and services,” he said. “I just don’t think you replicate that in a third party.”

Epic fired back saying how people can still choose to keep their phones locked down to apple but should still have the choice to go outside the app store and maybe even choose app stores with more secure and selective about what apps are on their app store. Epic pointed out several apps that violated that app store guidelines. The most notable being "Ganja Farmer: Weed Empire". Tim Apple replied "“It’s not 100 percent. It’s not perfect. You will find mistakes being made, But if you back up and look at it in the scheme of things, with 1.8 million or so apps on the store, we do a really good job."

Both parties are too present their final case on Monday or the judge will make a final decision. so grab some popcorn and we will see what happens in the next episode of Epic v Apple

 

Quote from the verge:
Epic v. Apple covers two separate issues: whether the market for in-app purchases within the App Store is unfairly monopolistic, and whether iOS itself is a monopoly that should be opened up to third-party stores and side-loaded apps. Cook addressed both with an appeal to user safety and privacy. “Privacy from our point of view is one of the most important issues of the century, and safety and security are the foundation that privacy is built upon,” he explained to an Apple attorney, echoing countless iPhone ad campaigns. “Technology has the ability to vacuum up all kinds of data from people, and we like to provide people tools to circumvent that.”

 

My thoughts

I am really not sure who is going to win. I think epic for app fairness and all that.
 

Sources

 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/tim-cook-e2-80-99s-fortnite-trial-testimony-was-unexpectedly-revealing/ar-AAKgLf4?ocid=uxbndlbing

https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/in-epic-vs-apple-tim-cook-made-most-important-sales-pitch-of-his-career-judge-wasnt-buying-it.html

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/apple-v-epic-tim-cook-offers-strong-defense-of-app-store/ar-AAKfckr?ocid=BingNewsSearch

[Sweet Pea]

1 hour ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

> Third parties would be able to vacuum up everything

 

Is their sandboxing that bad?

Someone clearly doesn’t understand how malware works.

[Arika]

5 hours ago, Bratstech said:

“Technology has the ability to vacuum up all kinds of data from people, and we like to provide people tools to circumvent that.”

Spoiler

"...unless you're the country where we manufacture all our stuff."

But it should still be up to the USER if they want to take those risks, not for Apple to enforce with an iron fist under the guise of "we know better".

[Sweet Pea]

16 minutes ago, Arika S said:

  Reveal hidden contents

"...unless you're the country where we manufacture all our stuff."

But it should still be up to the USER if they want to take those risks, not for Apple to enforce with an iron fist under the guise of "we know better".

Double edged sword here. On one hand, I agree, the other, I see problems. 
 

IME, especially with customers I work with, when a pop up on their Android or Windows device appears telling them to download a piece of software (malware, adware usually) they don’t think twice before installing it. 
 

With my family, they’ll download fake Chrome installers which end up as adware or search hijackers. 
 

If Apple does open up iOS, they need to do what Google Safe Browsing (and I conjunction, Play Protect) does and remove malicious apps without any user interaction. 

[IkeaGnome]

Or have it set to an option. Have the ability to select "Apple App store" only or allow you to download your own apps and app stores. Add to this it could be tied into parental controls and it's easy for Apple. "They had to change settings, they had warnings from us the first two times they tried to turn the setting warning about potentially malicious software/downloads. They did it anyways"

[WhitetailAni]

1 minute ago, IkeaGnome said:

Or have it set to an option. Have the ability to select "Apple App store" only or allow you to download your own apps and app stores. Add to this it could be tied into parental controls and it's easy for Apple. "They had to change settings, they had warnings from us the first two times they tried to turn the setting warning about potentially malicious software/downloads. They did it anyways"

This is what macOS does. If you want to install apps that aren't from the App Store, you have to:

1. Disable one or two settings in System Preferences

2. Confirm that you want to

3. Put in your password

4. (I think) restart

 

This way anyone who truly wants to can, and anyone who is just poking around in settings and sees something that says "You may break your device" will be deterred.

[Arika]

9 minutes ago, Science Officer Spock said:

 

If Apple does open up iOS, they need to do what Google Safe Browsing (and I conjunction, Play Protect) does and remove malicious apps without any user interaction. 

And apple should easily be able to do that, it's Apple...

 

9 minutes ago, Science Officer Spock said:

IME, especially with customers I work with, when a pop up on their Android or Windows device appears telling them to download a piece of software (malware, adware usually) they don’t think twice before installing it. 
 

With my family, they’ll download fake Chrome installers which end up as adware or search hijackers

And yet windows and android are still "open", they haven't gone into full lockdown because the onus is always on the user to take responsibility for what they download. If Microsoft started turning every single Windows copy into Windows 10S people would lose their absolute shit.

 

 

3 minutes ago, FakeKGB said:

This is what macOS does. If you want to install apps that aren't from the App Store, you have to:

1. Disable one or two settings in System Preferences

2. Confirm that you want to

3. Put in your password

4. (I think) restart

 

This way anyone who truly wants to can, and anyone who is just poking around in settings and sees something that says "You may break your device" will be deterred.

Android also has similar by making you agree to install from an unknown source and with a warning that says you are responsible for any damage to your phone or loss of data if you turn it on

[Kisai]

7 minutes ago, Arika S said:

  Reveal hidden contents

"...unless you're the country where we manufacture all our stuff."

But it should still be up to the USER if they want to take those risks, not for Apple to enforce with an iron fist under the guise of "we know better".

Look how well that works in reality with gun collectors.

 

For all practical reasons, there is a section of the population that believe they know better, but really do not, and those people make it frustrating for everyone. 

 

Apple, for all intents, should not be permitted to restrict what goes on their store, just like eBay or Amazon, as long as it's not criminally illegal. That's a problem when laws are different in every country. So the laws in the worst country end up being the lowest common denominator. You can try giving every country a different store, but then developers have to make sanitized versions of their apps for every store which just pushes the responsibility for following the law to the app devs, which can't be any more familiar than Apple with those laws, and have less capability to know.

 

Which as I said, look at gun collectors. There is a section of the population who do bad things with guns, so they all get collectively punished when something unfortunate happens.

 

The App store is the same way, every time someone puts something on the store that technically wasn't in the rules, but was breaking the spirit of the rules, the rules got changed, and everyone who wasn't breaking the rule gets punished by the new rule.

 

In an ideal situation, there would be no "app store" systems. But then we don't have the convenience of a unified download management/update system. So the hybrid option is really to just permit third party sites to generate download tickets to the Apple system. That permits a third party store without changing anything underneath, there's no conflict of app stores stomping on each other. The third party store pays Apple to put stuff on the store, and pays to generate download tickets. Apple then sets the price of the download tickets at the rate that doesn't create a net loss to them, and Apple can still protect Apple users from malicious software by whitelisting developers.

 

[Sweet Pea]

4 minutes ago, Arika S said:

And apple should easily be able to do that, it's Apple...

 

And yet windows and android are still "open", they haven't gone into full lockdown because the onus is always on the user to take responsibility for what they download. If Microsoft started turning every single Windows copy into Windows 10S people would lose their absolute shit.

I believe the best situation would be what @IkeaGnome said do the same thing Apple does with macOS where to sideload apps and alternative app stores you’d need to enable it in settings and have multiple warnings from Apple about uncurated apps.

[Arika]

18 minutes ago, Kisai said:

In an ideal situation, there would be no "app store" systems. But then we don't have the convenience of a unified download management/update system. So the hybrid option is really to just permit third party sites to generate download tickets to the Apple system. That permits a third party store without changing anything underneath, there's no conflict of app stores stomping on each other. The third party store pays Apple to put stuff on the store, and pays to generate download tickets. Apple then sets the price of the download tickets at the rate that doesn't create a net loss to them, and Apple can still protect Apple users from malicious software by whitelisting developers.

Given Apple's recent developments in 14.5 and how facebook and twitter are shitting themselves over the privacy settings, I think a compromise, at least at the start (baring in mind i don't know if this is how iOS works, but it is how Android works) just prevent Apps from having permissions to anything outside of itself. Yes it might break some things until the developer sorts it out.

 

For example an app like instagram (because i can't think of another), if you download it from a third party store, you can log in, and view your feed, but it will not allow storage access and thus cannot upload or download anything, No personal data can be taken, because that connection is cut off and it also cannot sneakily download malware in the background because it cannot write it to storage

 

This will also make games unable to auto update, again because write permissions would be disabled.

 

Basically an extreme form of sandboxing.

 

Apple aren't stupid (at least when it comes to this kind of stuff) i have zero doubt they can implement something that would be able to work. Otherwise, just make it very clear to the user that if they enable downloads from third party store, that Apple is not liable for any issues that come from it. Force the customer to agree by putting in their Apple ID and password/touchid/face id every time they open the other store or an app not downloaded from the offical app store. with the same warning.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Arika S said:

 

 

Apple aren't stupid (at least when it comes to this kind of stuff) i have zero doubt they can implement something that would be able to work. Otherwise, just make it very clear to the user that if they enable downloads from third party store, that Apple is not liable for any issues that come from it. Force the customer to agree by putting in their Apple ID and password/touchid/face id every time they open the other store or an app not downloaded from the offical app store. with the same warning.

This is missing the point. Phones are not computers. You can't just take your phone to the shop if you screw it up, you throw it away. Having people come in to a shop and being told to just buy a new one is what happens TODAY.

 

Dropping all responsibility and liability to the user creates a negative user experience, and companies that do so (see Youtube and Twitch when it comes to DMCA's) makes people blame the company for not protecting them.

 

Apple is in a better position not permitting a third party app store because it creates less support costs to them, and less cost on the customer because to be blunt "they are protected from being an idiot", at the cost of power users who know what they are doing avoiding the platform entirely.

 

The only way a third party store gets on the Apple devices is by Apple expressly permitting it and using the same underlying system the existing iOS software runs through for whitelisting. The minute you put a third party store on that serves the same software, that software starts stomping on each other. The minute you put a third party store on the same device that is unvetted, that becomes a malware vector that Apple has no control over other than shutting their store down and creating a huge liability.

 

Mac's only permit sideloading because their software environment going back to the beginning didn't have a store. That's the same as Windows. Even badgering the user that "this is absolutely unsafe" doesn't work because users have been trained to ignore these messages, just like "ignore false AV messages", Security stops working when it becomes common practice to ignore the idiot lights.

 

You either have security, or you have none at all. Apple has Security on iOS devices. Android doesn't, and the latter is where people have lost significant sums of money.

 

But let's be honest, the weakness of PHONES isn't even the OS, it's the underlying social engineering that gets you in trouble.

Hacked via sim-swap/number-porting.

https://www.wcpo.com/money/consumer/dont-waste-your-money/cash-app-scam-strikes-again-woman-loses-1-600

 

Hacked via social engineering.

 

The phones get blamed in both. But the responsibility for this still lies with the user? Allowing companies to get away with this is just asking for a situation where companies just blame you for being stupid and don't have to fix anything, or charge you money to do the equivalent of reformatting the hard drive. Which is what computer stores do TODAY when you bring it in for any problem. Why bother spending time on fixing the problem when you can make $250 by spending 2 hours reinstalling the OS, and the user is responsible for having backed up their data.

 

Honestly, we are at a cross-roads where Apple devices are preferred over Android devices exactly for privacy and security reasons, even of those security features are as weak as tissue paper. It's because Apple actually seems to give a care about their customers. Google sure doesn't. Samsung sure doesn't. Otherwise Android devices would also last 7 years, but they don't. Heck the only reason I keep pooh-poohing Android despite it being more "attractive" for a someone who likes to tinker like me, is because I've spent more time trying to fix problems for other people who have Android devices, and that just tells me the entire way Android does everything is broken, gum-and-bailing-wire patches to fix a fundamentally flawed mobile OS that lets applications stomp all over everything.

 

My mom and sister have gone through more phones than I have in the last 20 years. I've gone through 5. They've each gone through cheap phones every 1-2 years, and yet keep buying the cheap phones. Collectively they've spent more money on phones than I have, despite I having bought only two iphones in that time span. I actually held onto my Nokia N95 which was the last "tinker" phone I had. That came out the same year as the original iPhone in 2007. I didn't buy an iPhone until 2015. Unfortunately that iPhone 6S suffered from both the battery replacement issue and then ultimately died with the update to iOS 12, that somehow killed the charging chip. Right when I started the office job where I needed a phone. 

 

My mom doesn't need apps on her phone. My sister is a facebook user. Neither of them play games or do anything productive on their phones. Apple does not make a device that is "good/cheap enough" for their market. My dad bought himself and mom some cheapy Android devices, and used prepaid phone numbers because they don't use their devices anywhere near enough to justify the cost. Heck when Shaw came to install the new cable modem, Mom didn't have a phone they could install the shaw app on. The installer had to use their personal device.

 

Those of us on the LTT forums seem to not want to see the forest from the trees when it comes to this third party store nonsense. A third party store does zip for people who don't need features that don't come with the phone, yet the processes needed to enable one, weaken security for people who aren't adept with tech.

[HRD]

@gabrielcarvfer

If you want a million store and side-loading go with android and deal with all of the privacy and security issues. I think it is a consumer choice. Every business model has its pros and cons. By changing iOS we will have only one choice.

Making side-loading optional doesn’t really work. companies like Facebook will force you to go to their website and download instagram from their so they can bypass the privacy features.
+ we will have to deal with exclusives. If you want the new game or app turn on that option and download our store.

[SansVarnic]

-= Cleaned =-

Keep comments civil.

[Brooksie359]

4 hours ago, Arika S said:

  Reveal hidden contents

"...unless you're the country where we manufacture all our stuff."

But it should still be up to the USER if they want to take those risks, not for Apple to enforce with an iron fist under the guise of "we know better".

To be fair it is up to the user. If they don't like the way Apple handles their os then they can simply buy an android like many already do. I know my parents buy Apple because its simple and you can't really mess it up. I mean that has sorta always been Apples thing is to have a set experience that is uniform and pretty locked down. I don't see what the issue is with that so long as that is clear to the consumer which I think it is. I mean console games generally don't allow you to change much with the graphics settings while on the pc you can change them a ton. To some they like having the ability to customize the settings while to some they might prefer if it just works and they don't have to mess with any settings to get good performance. Its a very similar concept. 

[Biohazard777]

You want to develop an app for iOS, well you have to have an Apple device with MacOS to compile and publish, unless you run a Hackintosh and you don't want to waste money on HW you don't need (uploaded through it without any issues, didn't even have a license for the OS).
You have to get a DUNS number if you are company, welp I've got connections that issued me a DUNS number to a non-existent company. You know security is only as good as the weakest link, humans will always be the weakest link.
The only thing I couldn't get around is the yearly fee that must be payed to Apple to have the privilege to be on their store... How ironic.
 
All of you that put trust in a black box that is Apple way of doing this, good luck to you.
.

[Tenelia]

5 hours ago, Arika S said:

  Reveal hidden contents

"...unless you're the country where we manufacture all our stuff."

But it should still be up to the USER if they want to take those risks, not for Apple to enforce with an iron fist under the guise of "we know better".

It's Apple's business. Literally a BUSINESS. The entire ecosystem is put at risk just because of a few users wanting everyone else to cater to them? That's worse than smokers demanding other people get out of the way of their second-hand smoke, if they want to stay healthy.

[Mark Kaine]

2 hours ago, HRD said:

@gabrielcarvfer

If you want a million store and side-loading go with android and deal with all of the privacy and security issues. I think it is a consumer choice. Every business model has its pros and cons. By changing iOS we will have only one choice.

Making side-loading optional doesn’t really work. companies like Facebook will force you to go to their website and download instagram from their so they can bypass the privacy features.
+ we will have to deal with exclusives. If you want the new game or app turn on that option and download our store.

Funny enough the biggest privacy concerns on Android are related to Google and not third party…

[Arika]

1 hour ago, Tenelia said:

It's Apple's business. Literally a BUSINESS. The entire ecosystem is put at risk just because of a few users wanting everyone else to cater to them? That's worse than smokers demanding other people get out of the way of their second-hand smoke, if they want to stay healthy.

Do you think Apple in incompetent with their own OS and ThEiR bUsInEsS that they wouldn't be able to put additional safe guards in place along side allowing third party app stores?

[Brooksie359]

33 minutes ago, Arika S said:

Do you think Apple in incompetent with their own OS and ThEiR bUsInEsS that they wouldn't be able to put additional safe guards in place along side allowing third party app stores?

While this might be true I see no reason why they would have to. I mean I really find it hard to believe that Apple somehow is legally obligated to have certain features in their os. I guess now Microsoft has to allow third party game stores on their consoles. Also they should be legally obligated to allow third party xbox live like services. This honestly seems pretty ridiculous to me. If you don't like Apples way of doing things then simply buy something else. 

[RejZoR]

3 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

While this might be true I see no reason why they would have to. I mean I really find it hard to believe that Apple somehow is legally obligated to have certain features in their os. I guess now Microsoft has to allow third party game stores on their consoles. Also they should be legally obligated to allow third party xbox live like services. This honestly seems pretty ridiculous to me. If you don't like Apples way of doing things then simply buy something else. 

This is why I never understand the argument of people that Apple is obligated to do anything. It's literally THEIR everything from ground up. They designed devices, the app store, the whole ecosystem. It wasn't a collective of 150 phone makers around an OS someone else made (Google's Android) and they all eat from the same bowl. It's just Apple, on their own. If they decide to have total control over stuff they made in its entirety, then that's entirely their own choice.

 

It's also weird when people say "uh but then you have no choice". How again you don't? If you don't like iOS then you go with Android where you have all the freedom you want. But some then argue iPhones are still a huge market where it's worth investing. Well, that's funny too and it's exactly the same as the issue Apple itself is facing with the China situation. They don't like the fact they have to run servers for China for Chinese users and expose all data to Chinese gov as a result. But China is a big market and they feel it's still worth investing in it. If they really wouldn't want it, they could say "Fuck you China" and left their market. Just like users can say "Fuck you Apple" and go to Android. But for some reason they decide it's worthy to stick around Apple's ecosystem, but they endlessly bitch everyone should cater to them. Notice how weird that looks like?

 

Your example with consoles is very similar and very much valid. Imagine Microsoft gets forced to allow 3rd party stores on their Xbox console. You know, the console they designed, with ecosystem and services on it they designed, usually with huge loses because consoles have historically gave back profit through sales of games, not hardware itself. Imagine you spend billions designing console, OS for it and then all the big revenue goes to Epic because they forced in their game store on Xbox. Yeah, Apple's hardware is more like consoles in a lot of aspects. And their profit is heavily based on that. It's why Google doesn't give a lot of shit about it cos they are in entirely different business. They make Android the same way they make all other services. To hook users into their ecosystem of "everything is free shit" and then hoard on their data and make billions by selling ads to everyone.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Arika S said:

Do you think Apple in incompetent with their own OS and ThEiR bUsInEsS that they wouldn't be able to put additional safe guards in place along side allowing third party app stores?

It's the entire "closing the barn door after the horses have bolted", Look at the nvidia LHR driver on the 1060's, They made a single mistake and it's not possible to fix it.

 

It's the same arms race that happens with jailbreaks of devices. It's not good enough to support something without actually securing it. Third parties are notorious for screwups that compromise the devices. That's why historically, game consoles used proprietary media.

 

Look no further than EA and Sega back with the Genesis/MegaDrive. That's where this all started. They attempted to do the same thing that Compaq did to IBM.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Genesis#Electronic_Arts

Quote

EA founder Trip Hawkins confronted Nakayama the day before the 1990 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), informing him that EA had the ability to run its own licensing program if Sega refused to meet its demands. Sega relented, and the next day EA's upcoming Genesis games were showcased at CES.^[67]

 

EA signed what Hawkins described as "a very unusual and much more enlightened license agreement" with Sega in June 1990: "Among other things, we had the right to make as many titles as we wanted. We could approve our own titles ... the royalty rates were a lot more reasonable. We also had more direct control over manufacturing."^[69] After the deal was in place, EA chief creative officer Bing Gordon learned that "we hadn't figured out all the workarounds" and "Sega still had the ability to lock us out ... It just would have been a public relations fiasco."^[67]

 

cit 67 - Bertz, Matt (July 2011). "Reverse Engineering Success". Game Informer. Vol. 21 no. 219. GameStop. pp. 96–99.

Even then, with the Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360, the hardware vendors updated the firmware to close security holes. The Switch however being basically an Android  SoC hardware with a third party OS and board design, was easily hacked.

 

Once you try to secure things after the horses are gone, you are going to break existing software.

 

As I mentioned before, "software stomping on others" is something that happens on every device that has more than one way to install software on it.

Windows used to have dozens of ways of installing software on it, all of them awful. Steam is the only one that does things in a way that isn't annoying and time wasting. Other game stores? Won't even reinstall the game. And what about if you have purchased the game twice or three times, now you've paid for it three times, and they install in three different locations, how do you know which version is the one you're playing? Many games store their save games in the user directory, or Steam stores it in the cloud. What happens if you install the Steam store version and later download a version that includes DLC from EGS? You can't do that. Re-buy, re-download, and reinstall everything and start over.

 

There's no simplicity at all here. Yet you would like to bring this mess to iOS?

 

Let's not stop there. The Microsoft store, Adobe and Autodesk's own installers, various Installshield programs, all insist on doing things specific ways. Many open source programs likewise have obtuse packaging systems that may download 4GB worth of dependencies just to run a 10MB program.

 

A specific example of this already exists on Linux, but also exists on OSX, if you use Homebrew (brew), it will stomp on the OS's own versions of the same software.

 

Like there is no good reason to bring the complexities of a desktop PC to a phone. None whatsoever. And that also applies to the iPad. Sure a phone might be more powerful than a junker PC, but doesn't make it a good experience.

 

[Vishera]

15 hours ago, Bratstech said:

Tim Cook went to the court and did a testimony in person. Tim apples claim is that allowing the sideloading of apps creates risk of all kind of data being vacuumed up by third parties and makes the iPhone insecure. 

This screams: "I want control"

He is also a hypocrite,Why allow sideloading on the Mac but not on mobile devices? - Because the norm used to be freedom to the user and developers,but now it's all about control.

iOS is 14 years old compared to the Mac which is a 37 years old platform...

 

Obviously what Apple does is an Anti-trust violation,Epic wanted to open a store to compete with Apple,Apple doesn't allow that therefore they are stifling competition (under restraint of trade) and monopolizing the trade - which are violations of both § 1 and § 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 of the USA.

Violation of § 2 is a felony

 

Epic are no saints though,They violated the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 with their exclusivity deals,which are anti competitive because with the exclusivity deals they have the competition can't sell those games while Epic can sell them.

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Imagine Microsoft gets forced to allow 3rd party stores on their Xbox console

Well, if that meant Steam came to Xbox and then Microsoft implemented ability to play all your purchased PC games on it then hell yes I'm all for this. It'll never happen but one can dream 

[RejZoR]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

Well, if that meant Steam came to Xbox and then Microsoft implemented ability to play all your purchased PC games on it then hell yes I'm all for this. It'll never happen but one can dream 

See, that's the thing. Why would a company that made all of it happen and spent billions getting whole ecosystem to a point it is now and then just allow 3rd party that had nothing to do with any of it just tap into the big pile of gold? The situation on Android is entirely different because Google feeds of user data as primary source of income and 3rd party vendors who use Android don't really relate to it other than having active apps development so people have a reason to use platform.

 

For example, Xbox gaming on Windows PC is mutual relationship. Sure, you're not buying a console, but you're subscribing to Xbox Game Pass or you buy game from Microsoft Store. And you need Windows to begin with which is also Microsoft's product.

 

Also I don't think Steam (Windows PC) games would run all that well on Xbox, even though it's essentially a tiny PC.

[leadeater]

3 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Also I don't think Steam (Windows PC) games would run all that well on Xbox, even though it's essentially a tiny PC.

Why wouldn't it, Xbox running Windows NT kernel OS and uses DirectX. Darn sight easier than making x86 apps run on ARM.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_system_software