6 ms·

About time. I'm tired of apologizing to customers who purchase subscriptions in my app only to discover they could have purchased the exact the same thing from

by mil22 1y ago

About time. I'm tired of apologizing to customers who purchase subscriptions in my app only to discover they could have purchased the exact the same thing from my website for 15% less. "Why didn't you tell me?" Excerpt from the filing: "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."

stillatit 1y ago
So what is the punishment for outright lying under oath?
- 90s_dev 1y ago
  Generally none, the DA must choose to pursue perjury charges, which basically never happens. In reality, nearly everyone commits perjury. Thomas More would not approve. Both versions (1966 and 1988) of A Man For All Seasons are highly worth watching several times and practically memorizing. "Would you benefit England by populating her with liars?" [edit] in retrospect, there is one inescapable consequence of lying under oath: your word now means nothing to honest people.
  - usefulcat 1y ago
    I've not seen the one from 1988; I'll have to check that out. I've long enjoyed the one from '66. I also heartily recommend both seasons of Wolf Hall. About Cromwell rather than More, but still fascinating.
    - 90s_dev 1y ago
      The 1988 one stars Charlton Heston as Thomas More and was a made for TV movie based on the original 1965 play by Robert Bolt. Very, very good. Different from the 1966 movie. But both good in different ways. Neither is better.
  - labster 1y ago
    There are so few honest Americans that it hardly matters to serve such a small demographic.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    I bet if a poor person struggling to hold down three jobs to survive were found to be lying under oath, the DA would throw the book at them.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > if a poor person struggling to hold down three jobs to survive were found to be lying under oath, the DA would throw the book at them Have you been to a traffic court?
      - FireBeyond 1y ago
        Yeah. I was pulled over and told I had an "invalid" license. "My license isn't suspended!" "No, it's not, it's just invalid." Not expired. Not counterfeit. Just invalid. "What does that mean?" "You'll have ask the DOL. And here's a ticket. And you can't drive from here." Go home, go to the DOL's website. Green text, "VALID". Weird. "Pay any monies owing on your license." Let's try that. "There are no monies owed." Huh. Print these out, take them to the DOL. It was a technicality where a process had suspended my license over a fine, but then unsuspended it the same day because they'd received a check. She waives the $25 fee that should have been attached. And stamps the screenshots of this I'd taken, and prints out the status changes on my account. Take it to court to challenge the ticket. Prosecutor doesn't want to dismiss. "They'd have generated and sent you a letter when they did that, so you had to have known." Eventually dismissed, but only after three or four back-and-forths.
        JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        That’s hilarious. But also irrelevant. The point is people in traffic court are constantly lying. Like, zero-effort four-IQ lies.
        Mountain_Skies 1y ago
        Federal prosecutors have insanely high "winning" percentages but the closer you get to the local level, the more that drops. I suspect that local prosecutors, in addition to often having a poor understanding of the law, often try to up their win percentage by pushing cases like yours because they know most people will find it easier to just pay whatever token amount it takes to make it go away.
  - Jcampuzano2 1y ago
    To be honest companies practically incentivize having no moral compass and lying to succeed. Every major company's executives incorporate lying judiciously to their employees and their users alike and encourage their reports to lie to theirs and so on. Adhering to complete honesty is a one way ticket to HR. Sit on any all-hands call for a major company and it is practically guaranteed large chunks of the presentation will be executive gaslighting of its own employees with info that is objectively false or a misrepresentation. You will also never get a real answer to actual hard questions (especially if it is on the topic of something that may negatively affect workers) which is essentially lying by omission. It doesn't help that we have now proven that you can lie all the way to the seat of being president of the united states. That said - whether we like it or not, we are now a culture built on lying.
    - mil22 1y ago
      This matches my own personal experience of corporate America, and is one of the primary reasons I left. And it’s not just the lying that’s the problem - it’s the lack of critical thinking, the gullibility, the willingness to suspend disbelief and give benefit of the doubt and credit where it’s not due, amongst those being lied to, be they employees, or voters. The way out is to see through it, to question it, and to stop acquiescing to it. If we all do that, the liars will never ascend to the positions of power we have allowed them to have over us today.
    - saagarjha 1y ago
      Sure, but doing it in a court of law is illegal.
      - Jcampuzano2 1y ago
        Illegal but practically never actually consequential.
    - 90s_dev 1y ago
      > we are now a culture built on lying. Are now? I mentioned Thomas More to show that this exact same thing happened 500 years ago. The whole point of the movie A Man For All Seasons is to show that this is always how it has been throughout human history, and that only a few people stand out as putting the truth higher than their own interests, such as Thomas More and Joan of Arc, which deeply impress even non-religious people like Robert Bolt and Mark Twain.
  - dfedbeef 1y ago
    Oh no, my word means nothing to honest people. Boards private jet to Monaco
    - jkestner 1y ago
      Yet these superrich people crave respect so much that they endlessly poast on social networks, or buy a social network.
      - poincaredisk 1y ago
        >these superrich people crave respect so much Don't we all? This is one of the very basic human needs. Since they don't need to worry about food and shelter, they focus on social status and entertainment.
        dfedbeef 1y ago
        I think you're supposed to learn to respect yourself so your self worth isn't based on how other people view you.
  - DannyBee 1y ago
    This is mostly true - but it will be used against you in future civil proceedings as well. IE this person is now useless as a witness pretty much forever.
- georgemcbay 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - platevoltage 1y ago
    I mean, that contribution to his inauguration fund is what probably got them that tariff exemption.
- andrewmcwatters 1y ago
  Clearly nothing, since we've decided to be a nation that doesn't enforce laws.
Muromec 1y ago
Criminal contempt would the charge against the company or the people named above? How does it work in this case?
- mil22 1y ago
  "Accordingly ... the Court refers the issue to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California ... for investigation against Apple and Alex Roman, Apple’s Vice President of Finance specifically."
- propagandist 1y ago
  Read Taibbi's book, The Divide. No prison time is the most likely outcome unless the justice system has changed between then and now.
deleted 1y ago
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deleted 1y ago
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mvdtnz 1y ago
If you're publishing on the app store you are part of the problem. Your customers are right to feel aggrieved.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
autobodie 1y ago
About time for what? Another company to get charged with something that they don't get punished for? The fines are always less than the companies' net gains from the practice. Gains are often indirect, risk-related, and/or part of a larger strategy, so they cannot be calculated. Everything short of prison is a waste of time, waste of tax dollars, and spits in the face of decent citizens.
- echelon 1y ago
  100%. This doesn't deserve a fine. This deserves Apple to be given an ultimatum about their mob boss behavior with mobile. Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax. You can't even deploy your own apps at your own cadence, without strict review, using your own technology. You have to jump through unplanned upgrade cycles, you're forced to use their payment rails and signup flows (and don't get to know your customer or get them to use your website). You pay the taxes on everything. And even then, they let your competitors advertise against your name or trademark. This is rotten to the core. Neither Google nor Apple should have an app store. Apps should be web installs. The only reason things work the way they do is so that Apple and Google can tax and exert control. A permissions system, signature scans, and heuristics are all that are needed to keep web installs safe - and all of those pieces are already in place. There's no technical or safety limitation, Apple and Google just want to dominate. These two companies were innovative 20 years ago, but their lead then doesn't entitle them to keep owning the majority of most people's computing surface area for the rest of time. They have to give up the reigns. There are still billions of dollars for them to make on mobile, even if regulators tell them to stop treating developers as serfs and locking them in cages. No. More. App. Stores. Regulate big tech's hold over mobile, web, search, and advertising.
  - lwo32k 1y ago
    Its not possible for them to make "billions of dollars" any other way - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_economy
    - 1y ago
brailsafe 1y ago
> About time. Oh c'mon, 16 years into a product line ain't too bad, is it? If you had a kid when the App Store first came out, that kid would now be nearing high school graduation and you still can't do as you describe. The great recession, the pandemic, the iPad, proliferation of AI, legalization of Gay marriage in the states and weed in some places, annexation of crimea and the war in Ukraine, the foxconn suicide issue, 4G, LTE, 5G, fiber to the home, brexit, Golang, Rust, TypeScript, Swift, APFS, Arm and the downfall of Intel, the rise of NVIDIA, Netflix, TikTok, drones, electric cars, scooters, bikes, end-to-end design and construction of their mothership headquarters, and federal acknowledgement that climate change is an issue, have all basically happened in that time; but nope, it's for security reasons. Hell, even their lead industrial designer retired long before they'd let up. Edit: Not that any of those have anything to do with the App Store, but still.
- retetr 1y ago
  We didn't start the fire, it was always burning since the world's been turning...
to11mtm 1y ago
> 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. Here's the fun question though. Do Roman, Maestri et al not have any specific damages to this? (I know the answer, but it's a good question to ask....)
musicale 1y ago
> To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath Well that sounds rather damning.
- stingraycharles 1y ago
  Happens more than you’d think. Happened to me in the past as well in some business conflict. It was baffling how people can just lie in court under oath and get away with it.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    The asterisk is that the government has to be able to prove knowledge and intent to lie, and prove that beyond a reasonable doubt. It makes it really hard to successfully charge anybody with perjury.
  - tebbers 1y ago
    What happened to the people who lied under oath? Were they found out?
    - stingraycharles 1y ago
      No, it was their CFO who denied knowing about <something> when he absolutely did. We ended up winning the lawsuit on all accounts, but they were never specifically called out about lying about this.
- zik 1y ago
  Surely he should receive a prison sentence for that alone?
  - numbsafari 1y ago
    With the referral to the US attorney’s office, he actually might. Consider how painful that is going to be for Apple, and Roman, with how the current administration is abusing the DOJ. The repercussions of this could be huge.
zelphirkalt 1y ago
And what happens now to those who lied under oath? Can we get those people properly punished and send some signals? Or are they above the law somehow?
- spencerflem 1y ago
  The USA is an oligarchy
scarface_74 1y ago
Will Walmart let you have a label on your product saying you could get it cheaper from Amazon?
- TheDong 1y ago
  Will walmart open your packaging, review all text in the manual, and tell you that you need to reprint your manual because it has a link to your homepage "company.com" and on that page you can find a pricing page with lower prices? Will walmart prevent you from selling, say, a fishing pole that allows you to buy fishing hooks from another store? Apple's app-store review would reject any app that linked the company pricing page, and would reject any app that let you use an alternative payment method like paypal or a credit card on a non-apple site. Also, in your analogy the customer has to be unable to buy your app from anywhere else (since the customer has an iPhone and there are no other stores or operating systems for iPhone).. It really doesn't work as a good comparison imo.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    The parent poster just said that customers can pay on his website so I’m assuming it’s a service surfaced by his app.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- saagarjha 1y ago
  > Thus the Court found: > In retail brick-and-mortar stores, consumers do not lack knowledge of options. Technology platforms differ. Yeah, but keep going on about how this is the same as Walmart
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    Yet everyday, people seem to know that to use Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, etc on their phone, they have to sign up on the website since you can’t pay for either via in app purchases.
gorbachev 1y ago
In the inevitable case where this lands Apple serious monetary penalties affecting the quarterly earnings, how many employees will be laid off? Will Alex Roman be one of them? I'd bet no.

by mil22 1y ago

stillatit 1y ago

So what is the punishment for outright lying under oath?

90s_dev 1y ago
Generally none, the DA must choose to pursue perjury charges, which basically never happens. In reality, nearly everyone commits perjury. Thomas More would not approve. Both versions (1966 and 1988) of A Man For All Seasons are highly worth watching several times and practically memorizing. "Would you benefit England by populating her with liars?" [edit] in retrospect, there is one inescapable consequence of lying under oath: your word now means nothing to honest people.
- usefulcat 1y ago
  I've not seen the one from 1988; I'll have to check that out. I've long enjoyed the one from '66. I also heartily recommend both seasons of Wolf Hall. About Cromwell rather than More, but still fascinating.
  - 90s_dev 1y ago
    The 1988 one stars Charlton Heston as Thomas More and was a made for TV movie based on the original 1965 play by Robert Bolt. Very, very good. Different from the 1966 movie. But both good in different ways. Neither is better.
- labster 1y ago
  There are so few honest Americans that it hardly matters to serve such a small demographic.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  I bet if a poor person struggling to hold down three jobs to survive were found to be lying under oath, the DA would throw the book at them.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > if a poor person struggling to hold down three jobs to survive were found to be lying under oath, the DA would throw the book at them Have you been to a traffic court?
    - FireBeyond 1y ago
      Yeah. I was pulled over and told I had an "invalid" license. "My license isn't suspended!" "No, it's not, it's just invalid." Not expired. Not counterfeit. Just invalid. "What does that mean?" "You'll have ask the DOL. And here's a ticket. And you can't drive from here." Go home, go to the DOL's website. Green text, "VALID". Weird. "Pay any monies owing on your license." Let's try that. "There are no monies owed." Huh. Print these out, take them to the DOL. It was a technicality where a process had suspended my license over a fine, but then unsuspended it the same day because they'd received a check. She waives the $25 fee that should have been attached. And stamps the screenshots of this I'd taken, and prints out the status changes on my account. Take it to court to challenge the ticket. Prosecutor doesn't want to dismiss. "They'd have generated and sent you a letter when they did that, so you had to have known." Eventually dismissed, but only after three or four back-and-forths.
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        That’s hilarious. But also irrelevant. The point is people in traffic court are constantly lying. Like, zero-effort four-IQ lies.
      - Mountain_Skies 1y ago
        Federal prosecutors have insanely high "winning" percentages but the closer you get to the local level, the more that drops. I suspect that local prosecutors, in addition to often having a poor understanding of the law, often try to up their win percentage by pushing cases like yours because they know most people will find it easier to just pay whatever token amount it takes to make it go away.
- Jcampuzano2 1y ago
  To be honest companies practically incentivize having no moral compass and lying to succeed. Every major company's executives incorporate lying judiciously to their employees and their users alike and encourage their reports to lie to theirs and so on. Adhering to complete honesty is a one way ticket to HR. Sit on any all-hands call for a major company and it is practically guaranteed large chunks of the presentation will be executive gaslighting of its own employees with info that is objectively false or a misrepresentation. You will also never get a real answer to actual hard questions (especially if it is on the topic of something that may negatively affect workers) which is essentially lying by omission. It doesn't help that we have now proven that you can lie all the way to the seat of being president of the united states. That said - whether we like it or not, we are now a culture built on lying.
  - mil22 1y ago
    This matches my own personal experience of corporate America, and is one of the primary reasons I left. And it’s not just the lying that’s the problem - it’s the lack of critical thinking, the gullibility, the willingness to suspend disbelief and give benefit of the doubt and credit where it’s not due, amongst those being lied to, be they employees, or voters. The way out is to see through it, to question it, and to stop acquiescing to it. If we all do that, the liars will never ascend to the positions of power we have allowed them to have over us today.
  - saagarjha 1y ago
    Sure, but doing it in a court of law is illegal.
    - Jcampuzano2 1y ago
      Illegal but practically never actually consequential.
  - 90s_dev 1y ago
    > we are now a culture built on lying. Are now? I mentioned Thomas More to show that this exact same thing happened 500 years ago. The whole point of the movie A Man For All Seasons is to show that this is always how it has been throughout human history, and that only a few people stand out as putting the truth higher than their own interests, such as Thomas More and Joan of Arc, which deeply impress even non-religious people like Robert Bolt and Mark Twain.
- dfedbeef 1y ago
  Oh no, my word means nothing to honest people. Boards private jet to Monaco
  - jkestner 1y ago
    Yet these superrich people crave respect so much that they endlessly poast on social networks, or buy a social network.
    - poincaredisk 1y ago
      >these superrich people crave respect so much Don't we all? This is one of the very basic human needs. Since they don't need to worry about food and shelter, they focus on social status and entertainment.
      - dfedbeef 1y ago
        I think you're supposed to learn to respect yourself so your self worth isn't based on how other people view you.
- DannyBee 1y ago
  This is mostly true - but it will be used against you in future civil proceedings as well. IE this person is now useless as a witness pretty much forever.
georgemcbay 1y ago
[flagged]
- platevoltage 1y ago
  I mean, that contribution to his inauguration fund is what probably got them that tariff exemption.
andrewmcwatters 1y ago
Clearly nothing, since we've decided to be a nation that doesn't enforce laws.

Muromec 1y ago

Criminal contempt would the charge against the company or the people named above? How does it work in this case?

mil22 1y ago
"Accordingly ... the Court refers the issue to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California ... for investigation against Apple and Alex Roman, Apple’s Vice President of Finance specifically."
propagandist 1y ago
Read Taibbi's book, The Divide. No prison time is the most likely outcome unless the justice system has changed between then and now.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

mvdtnz 1y ago

If you're publishing on the app store you are part of the problem. Your customers are right to feel aggrieved.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

autobodie 1y ago

About time for what? Another company to get charged with something that they don't get punished for? The fines are always less than the companies' net gains from the practice. Gains are often indirect, risk-related, and/or part of a larger strategy, so they cannot be calculated. Everything short of prison is a waste of time, waste of tax dollars, and spits in the face of decent citizens.

echelon 1y ago
100%. This doesn't deserve a fine. This deserves Apple to be given an ultimatum about their mob boss behavior with mobile. Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax. You can't even deploy your own apps at your own cadence, without strict review, using your own technology. You have to jump through unplanned upgrade cycles, you're forced to use their payment rails and signup flows (and don't get to know your customer or get them to use your website). You pay the taxes on everything. And even then, they let your competitors advertise against your name or trademark. This is rotten to the core. Neither Google nor Apple should have an app store. Apps should be web installs. The only reason things work the way they do is so that Apple and Google can tax and exert control. A permissions system, signature scans, and heuristics are all that are needed to keep web installs safe - and all of those pieces are already in place. There's no technical or safety limitation, Apple and Google just want to dominate. These two companies were innovative 20 years ago, but their lead then doesn't entitle them to keep owning the majority of most people's computing surface area for the rest of time. They have to give up the reigns. There are still billions of dollars for them to make on mobile, even if regulators tell them to stop treating developers as serfs and locking them in cages. No. More. App. Stores. Regulate big tech's hold over mobile, web, search, and advertising.
- lwo32k 1y ago
  Its not possible for them to make "billions of dollars" any other way - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_economy
  - 1y ago

brailsafe 1y ago

> About time. Oh c'mon, 16 years into a product line ain't too bad, is it? If you had a kid when the App Store first came out, that kid would now be nearing high school graduation and you still can't do as you describe. The great recession, the pandemic, the iPad, proliferation of AI, legalization of Gay marriage in the states and weed in some places, annexation of crimea and the war in Ukraine, the foxconn suicide issue, 4G, LTE, 5G, fiber to the home, brexit, Golang, Rust, TypeScript, Swift, APFS, Arm and the downfall of Intel, the rise of NVIDIA, Netflix, TikTok, drones, electric cars, scooters, bikes, end-to-end design and construction of their mothership headquarters, and federal acknowledgement that climate change is an issue, have all basically happened in that time; but nope, it's for security reasons. Hell, even their lead industrial designer retired long before they'd let up. Edit: Not that any of those have anything to do with the App Store, but still.

retetr 1y ago
We didn't start the fire, it was always burning since the world's been turning...

to11mtm 1y ago

> 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. Here's the fun question though. Do Roman, Maestri et al not have any specific damages to this? (I know the answer, but it's a good question to ask....)

musicale 1y ago

> To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath Well that sounds rather damning.

stingraycharles 1y ago
Happens more than you’d think. Happened to me in the past as well in some business conflict. It was baffling how people can just lie in court under oath and get away with it.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  The asterisk is that the government has to be able to prove knowledge and intent to lie, and prove that beyond a reasonable doubt. It makes it really hard to successfully charge anybody with perjury.
- tebbers 1y ago
  What happened to the people who lied under oath? Were they found out?
  - stingraycharles 1y ago
    No, it was their CFO who denied knowing about <something> when he absolutely did. We ended up winning the lawsuit on all accounts, but they were never specifically called out about lying about this.
zik 1y ago
Surely he should receive a prison sentence for that alone?
- numbsafari 1y ago
  With the referral to the US attorney’s office, he actually might. Consider how painful that is going to be for Apple, and Roman, with how the current administration is abusing the DOJ. The repercussions of this could be huge.

zelphirkalt 1y ago

And what happens now to those who lied under oath? Can we get those people properly punished and send some signals? Or are they above the law somehow?

spencerflem 1y ago
The USA is an oligarchy

scarface_74 1y ago

Will Walmart let you have a label on your product saying you could get it cheaper from Amazon?

TheDong 1y ago
Will walmart open your packaging, review all text in the manual, and tell you that you need to reprint your manual because it has a link to your homepage "company.com" and on that page you can find a pricing page with lower prices? Will walmart prevent you from selling, say, a fishing pole that allows you to buy fishing hooks from another store? Apple's app-store review would reject any app that linked the company pricing page, and would reject any app that let you use an alternative payment method like paypal or a credit card on a non-apple site. Also, in your analogy the customer has to be unable to buy your app from anywhere else (since the customer has an iPhone and there are no other stores or operating systems for iPhone).. It really doesn't work as a good comparison imo.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  The parent poster just said that customers can pay on his website so I’m assuming it’s a service surfaced by his app.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
saagarjha 1y ago
> Thus the Court found: > In retail brick-and-mortar stores, consumers do not lack knowledge of options. Technology platforms differ. Yeah, but keep going on about how this is the same as Walmart
- scarface_74 1y ago
  Yet everyday, people seem to know that to use Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, etc on their phone, they have to sign up on the website since you can’t pay for either via in app purchases.

gorbachev 1y ago

In the inevitable case where this lands Apple serious monetary penalties affecting the quarterly earnings, how many employees will be laid off? Will Alex Roman be one of them? I'd bet no.