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But there's no consumer-facing or technical difference between a games streaming platform and a video streaming platform that would make it logical for one to b

• zimpenfish 6y ago
  > But there's no consumer-facing or technical difference between a games streaming platform and a video streaming platform A games streaming platform is interactive whereas a video streaming platform isn't (unless you want to split hairs and call "picking something to watch" interactive.) That's both a consumer-facing and technical difference. Whether it's enough to treat them fundamentally differently, I have no idea (but I'm sure lawyers will have plenty.)
  • LocalH 6y ago
    Where does Black Mirror: Bandersnatch sit on that scale? It’s clearly interactive.
• zepto 6y ago
  The difference between colors of shirt is quite obviously not analogous to the level of difference between a game and a movie. It’s hard to believe you don’t see this. Do you really not? If your argument is that all apps are just like different colors of a shirt, then if movies are no different from games, movies are also no different from programming languages, or telemedicine apps. If your argument is that Apple shouldn’t be allowed to make rules based on distinctions between what apps do, that is a reasonable position to argue on its own merits. Claiming there is no distinction between what classes of app do, is not reasonable. Your argument about making an exception for your friend Tim doesn’t apply here. If Apple were to make an exception and allow just one game streaming service, then I’d agree it was a valid analogy, but they don’t. And yes, there are huge consumer facing and technical differences between game streaming and video streaming services. The biggest one is that a game streaming service can stream any kind of app, and bypass app review and apple’s payment services. We might want people to be able to do that, but that’s a different matter. The technical difference is very obvious, and it’s exactly what Apple has said - they don’t want apps bypassing app review.
  • danShumway 6y ago
    > Do you really not? Honestly, no, I genuinely don't. I do think the shirt colors are analogous. The technical differences you and others are talking about are not differences that affect Apple in any way. It's not harder on Apple's infrastructure for someone to stream a game instead of a movie, it doesn't take Apple any extra engineering effort or development time. The technical differences people are talking about are mostly outside the iPhone and its core APIs. They don't affect Apple or users in way that's relevant to Apple's policies. Likewise with the user-facing distinctions -- I don't think the distinctions that you're talking about are something that users care about, and I don't think there's a strong argument to be made that Apple is thinking about users when it makes those distinctions. I don't see how users benefit from games and Ebooks being treated differently than movies. From a user perspective, this is all just 'content'. > If Apple were to make an exception and allow just one game streaming service, then I’d agree it was a valid analogy, but they don’t. Oh, no. Anyone with a striped shirt, buzzcut, and blue eyes can get a discount. There are likely multiple people who fit that description, it's not just Tim. But I don't want to get hung up on that analogy if you think that's too direct or contrived. Another analogy I'd point towards is VPNs and video streaming in regards to net neutrality. In fact, ISPs actually had a much stronger argument for treating video bits differently from other bits on the network, since services like Netflix did genuinely consume more bandwidth than services in other categories. However, we all (mostly) still recognized that the differences between streaming a video and streaming any other kinds of data weren't relevant to ISPs. I think the distinctions people are raising between video and game streaming are the same -- they're not relevant to an app distribution platform. I don't think the Bandersnatch comparison is splitting hairs, I think it's a reasonable comparison to make. I don't think that bypassing app review is relevant to consumers for a streaming platform, since bypassing app review within a streaming platform introduces no security or privacy risks for the end user. The business-facing reason apps can't bypass app review and payment services is because Apple is providing a service that needs to be payed for -- but streaming apps fundamentally do not take advantage of any of those services. It makes about as much commercial sense to charge them as it makes to charge for transactions made inside a web browser. I especially don't see a difference between a games streaming platform and a virtual desktop, another distinction that Apple seems to think is worthy of entirely separate rules. Consumers do not care about whether a virtual computer immediately boots into a game or whether it forces them to click on an icon first. Even from a purely practical perspective, I don't think there's strong evidence that games streaming would break Apple's entire revenue model. There's a tangible, consumer-facing benefit to apps working offline that some app-makers will want to take advantage of. Streaming games is not an existential threat to the app store, at least certainly not a larger existential threat than web browsers are. Finally, I don't think it's possible to separate the theoretical differences between games/videos/ebooks/virtual desktops from the context in which Apple chose to split along those categories. Apple didn't come up with those categories and then afterwards check to see what the market looked like. Sure there are theoretical reasons (weak as they are) that Apple could have chosen to build its policies around esoteric "what is a game" arguments, but the simplest explanation for why Apple chose to put so much weight on those distinctions is because it allowed them to bend to large players on the market who they could not ignore, while still restricting and gouging smaller players and upstarts who could not challenge them.