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If I'm reading this right, Apple would be forced to make private APIs public. That could be interesting and also a nightmare, especially if some developers use

If I'm reading this right, Apple would be forced to make private APIs public. That could be interesting and also a nightmare, especially if some developers use some private apis in dark patterns (eg take the 2/4/6 minute reminders iMessage gives you, now make that every minute or so). They also beta test APIs in a version and then the following version release a public type of it. I'm not a fan of services utilizing alternative payment methods for subscriptions as using the App Store Subscriptions page is the easiest I've ever used. Now if you were forced to use the apple subscriptions page API but your own payment provider, that could make more sense. I'm curious if this applies to Xbox/Playstation/Nintendo though.

rahkiin 5y ago
This sounds like it covers gaming consoles as well as they have app stores. Or are they going to claim they have game stores instead of app stores?
shagie 5y ago
There's that 50,000,000 number in there... which have to be US customers. There have only been 9.37M Nintendo switch sold in the US. Playstation 5 has only 10M worldwide sales. Only 6.5M total Xbox X/S sales. So, none of the game consoles or devices would be covered under this. Rather convenient for those companies.
- redxdev 5y ago
  There's a question of whether newer generations of consoles count as having different app stores, which would change those numbers. Does having a different store platform make it count separately? Does having a new generation of device count separately? Or is it any user of any store platform owned by a single company? For example, the Xbox One and Xbox Series X use the same store but they're different generations of Xbox. Do you count those users together or not? If those aren't counted together, what about mid-generation refreshes like the Xbox One S or Xbox One X? If generations are counted separately, what about iPhone generations? Or the fact that Android isn't even based around generations since there are multiple manufacturers? And there's the question of what counts as a user for the purpose of this bill - would anyone who has ever bought into the ecosystem count? Or would it be something like monthly active users? The intention here is obviously to go after Apple/Google, but the wording of the user count just seems way too open as to make it unclear if markets outside of the mobile space are affected. Full disclosure, I work for Microsoft and Xbox. I have feelings about how this would affect Xbox (which would obviously be biased), but even without getting to them it's unclear whether this bill would even be relevant.

rahkiin 5y ago

This sounds like it covers gaming consoles as well as they have app stores. Or are they going to claim they have game stores instead of app stores?

shagie 5y ago

There's that 50,000,000 number in there... which have to be US customers. There have only been 9.37M Nintendo switch sold in the US. Playstation 5 has only 10M worldwide sales. Only 6.5M total Xbox X/S sales. So, none of the game consoles or devices would be covered under this. Rather convenient for those companies.

redxdev 5y ago
There's a question of whether newer generations of consoles count as having different app stores, which would change those numbers. Does having a different store platform make it count separately? Does having a new generation of device count separately? Or is it any user of any store platform owned by a single company? For example, the Xbox One and Xbox Series X use the same store but they're different generations of Xbox. Do you count those users together or not? If those aren't counted together, what about mid-generation refreshes like the Xbox One S or Xbox One X? If generations are counted separately, what about iPhone generations? Or the fact that Android isn't even based around generations since there are multiple manufacturers? And there's the question of what counts as a user for the purpose of this bill - would anyone who has ever bought into the ecosystem count? Or would it be something like monthly active users? The intention here is obviously to go after Apple/Google, but the wording of the user count just seems way too open as to make it unclear if markets outside of the mobile space are affected. Full disclosure, I work for Microsoft and Xbox. I have feelings about how this would affect Xbox (which would obviously be biased), but even without getting to them it's unclear whether this bill would even be relevant.