#Apple iPhone Apps

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Apple faces criminal sanctions for defying App Store antitrust order

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND TODAY (May 2), and in WELLINGTON TOMORROW (May 3). More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.

Epic, makers of the wildly popular Fortnite video-game, have waged a one-company war against the "app tax" – the 15-30% rake that the mobile duopoly of Apple/Google take out of every penny we spend inside of apps.

Epic's own digital practices are hardly spotless: just this year, the company was caught cheating players – many of them children – with deceptive practices and had to refund over $72m:

https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/fortnite-refunds

But in this fight, Epic is on the side of the angels. The 30% that Apple/Google sucks out of the mobile economy is a brutal tax, and not just on app makers. Patreon performers recently raised a stink when the company announced that it would be clawing back 30% of the money pledged by their supporters – that 30% surcharge is passed straight through to Apple/Google:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/12/24218629/patreon-membership-ios-30-percent-apple-tax

From independent news outlets to crafters selling their work out of small storefronts, all the way up to massive entertainment services like Disney Plus and Fortnite, the mobile cartel takes 30% out of every dollar, a racket they maintain with onerous rules that ban apps from using their own payment processors, or even from encouraging users to click a link that brings them to a web-based payment screen.

30% is a gigantic markup on payment processing. It's ten times the going rate for payments in the USA, already one of the most expensive places in the world to transfer money from one party to another. In the EU, payment processing typically runs 1%…or less.

But crafters, Patreon podcasters and small-town newspapers are in no position to fight Google and Apple. Instead, we get Epic, a multi-billion-dollar company that's gone to the mattresses to fight these multi-trillion-dollar companies. Personally, I dote on billionaire-on-trillionaire violence.

Epic was wildly successful. It mopped up the floor with Google, securing an especially punitive award from a judge who was furious that Google had destroyed evidence:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger

Epic also won against Apple, though not as thoroughly as it had with Google, because Apple had the commonsense not to get up to the kind of shenanigans that make federal judges very, very mad. In the Google case, the court found that Google had acted as a monopolist and ordered it to open up the payment system in Google Play, a direct blow to the Android app tax.

In the Apple case, the judge did not find that Google had acted as a monopolist, but did rule that the App Store's payment processing racket violated the law, and ordered Apple to end its own app tax:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/30/epic-games-just-scored-a-major-win-against-apple/

That's where things get gnarly. Apple is addicted to corrupt sources of income – like the tens of billions it illegally receives every year in bribes from Google make it the default search:

https://apnews.com/article/google-antitrust-search-engine-verdict-apple-319a61f20fb11510097845a30abaefd8

And it really, really loves the app tax. When the EU ordered Apple to allow third-party app stores (as a way of killing the app tax), the company cooked up a malicious compliance plan that was comically corrupt:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

So, the mere fact that a federal judge had ordered Apple to open up its app store to competing payment processors was not going convince Apple to actually do it. Instead, Apple cooked up a set of rules for third-party payment processing that would make it more costly to use someone else's payments, piling up a mountain of junk fees and using scare screens and other deceptive warnings to discourage users from making payments through a rival system:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-apple-executive-lied

That's the kind of thing that is apt to make a federal judge angry – and, as noted, angry federal judges can make life very hard for tech monopolists, a lesson Google learned when it destroyed key evidence in its Epic case. But Apple didn't just flout the court order – they lied about it to cover it up, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is furious. She held that Alex Roman, Apple's Vice-President of Finance, "outright lied under oath," and she has raised the possibility of criminal contempt penalties for Apple:

https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/05/01/pacer_epic_vs_apple_injunction_judgement.pdf

The judge further wrote:

This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction. Effective immediately Apple will no longer impede developers’ ability to communicate with users nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases

In other words, any junk fees, any impediments to opening up third party payments, will be switfly and harshly dealt with. As of right now developers can start to build third-party payments into their apps and Apple cannot block them. It's the end of the app tax, a source of about $100b/year for Apple:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/01/apple_epic_lies_possible_crime/

The world is on fire and everything is terrible, but we are also living through the most consequential season in the history of the war on corporate tech power. Google has been convicted three times of being a monopolist and is almost certainly going to have to sell off Chrome, most of its ad-tech stack, and possibly Android. Meta just put up a pathetic showing in an equally serious antitrust case that could see it forced to sell off Instagram and Whatsapp:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/11/it-is-better-to-buy/#than-to-compete

Countries around the world have passed big, sweeping, muscular antitrust laws specifically aimed at smashing corporate tech power, like the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act:

https://www.eff.org/pages/adoption-dsadma-notre-analyse

Most importantly, all of this is happening from the bottom up. There is no dark money campaign to fuck up the tech companies. The politicians and enforcers who are taking on Big Tech are being shoved from behind by billions of everyday people who are furious and refuse to take it any longer:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever-2/#oligarchism

I am deeply grateful for the public servants who have championed this cause, but I also know that these people are the effect of our movement, not the cause. When Kier Starmer fires Britain's brilliant and effective top competition enforcer and replaces him with the former head of Amazon UK, that does nothing to tamp down the political outrage that Britons feel towards America's tech giants:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

All over the world, countries that passed IP laws to protect US tech interests in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets are grappling with the end of free trade with America. This represents a generational opportunity to pass laws that enable local technologists to jailbreak US tech exports and liberate their people from the extractive practices of Big Tech forever:

https://archive.is/CiBIz

There is nothing harder to stop than an idea whose time has come to pass.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

Image: Alex Popovkin, Bahia, Brazil from Brazil (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annelid_worm,_Atlantic_forest,_northern_littoral_of_Bahia,_Brazil_%2816107326533%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

--

Hubertl (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2015-03-04_Elstar_%28apple%29_starting_putrefying_IMG_9761_bis_9772.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[dropoutposts]

After trying and utterly failing to sign up for Apple TV+, all I can say is it really makes me appreciate Dropout's interface more.

[feminist-space]

You can go to Settings --> Apps --> Photos --> (scroll down to) Enhanced Visual Search --> toggle to off

"Apple last year deployed a mechanism for identifying landmarks and places of interest in images stored in the Photos application on its customers iOS and macOS devices and enabled it by default, seemingly without explicit consent.

Apple customers have only just begun to notice.

The feature, known as Enhanced Visual Search, was called out last week by software developer Jeff Johnson, who expressed concern in two write-ups about Apple's failure to explain the technology, which is believed to have arrived with iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1 on October 28, 2024."

[autristic]

[andthemoonalwaysfollows]

i’m not one for violence but i wish pestilence and plague on whoever decided the photos app needed to be changed

[observethewalrus]

PLEASE DO NOT GIFT ME BADGES

Tumblr is getting rid of avatars and no longer showing where a reblog comes from in post headers to “afford more room for badges.”

I always felt kinda bad when I was gifted badges and then didn’t use them, cuz people spent actual money on them. So I’m asking, please do not gift me badges, or any other tumblr merch for that matter.

I threw them a bone last year and paid for the ad-free because the ads and blazed softcore porn on the app were infuriating, but I’m canceling it. They’re not getting anything from me anymore. I’ll have to switch back to using the Firefox mobile browser. Hopefully the new dash un-fuckers that are going around will work on mobile.

[queenarsinoethepoisoner]

Guys what the fuck is up with Apple. Why did they change the photos app. It was perfectly fine before hand. How could they do this to me.

[indeedgoodman]

[phecdasolar]

This poll is dedicated to my overwhelming sensory hell upon updating my phone last night that literally put me in tears <3 If anyone knows how to revert an update PLEASE lmk <3333

[purplethespian]

PSA for iPhone Users

Apple Intelligence is now able to read messages sent using the app Signal.

If you have an iPhone 15 or 16 and you have downloaded iOS 18.1, you will need to either completely disable Apple Intelligence or simply ensure it is not enabled for Signal. Otherwise, it will be able to scan and read the content of your messages in the app.

To do so: 1. Go to Settings 2. Scroll to Apps 3. Select Signal 4. Turn off "Learn from this app" and the other two settings.

It is also suggested that, at a minimum, you turn off Apple Intelligence for your financial- and travel-related apps. You may want to also follow these steps if you are an iPad user.

Source: one of my relatives is in the FBI and shared this information with our family.

[sandandjello]

The Easy Way to Make Your Dumb Smartphone Calculator a Little Smarter

[donotdestroy]

"This code, the lawsuit alleges, allowed Amazon to gather a large volume of timestamped geolocation data. This data provided Amazon with information about where consumers live, work, shop and visit, potentially revealing sensitive details such as religious affiliations, sexual orientations, and health concerns."

[jabisdumb]

Hey hi hello, would like to notify anybody following me that I might be pretty quiet for the next little while.

(This is unrelated to any Current Events)

Accepting a routine terms of service update on my iPhone the other day took a massive MASSIVE half hazard chunk out of all of the notes stored on my iCloud account, setting some back months and months and entirely deleting others, with no care for dates edited and no way for me to even know for sure how much is actually missing without checking for specific things.

Some were my only written record of certain character or story concepts, one was a list of specific ideas to draw that I edited very regularly (practically every other day) and it has been mercilessly reverted to a version from the end of May this year with absolutely no way to recover it.

This kind of loss of my own written records is a personal nightmare of mine, especially because I do not have a fantastic memory. As an artist and a writer this is a massive blow, and I am emotionally devastated.

I am safe/well mentally and physically, I will come back from this emotionally, all is not lost, and I know especially that this is not the worst thing going on in the world at this particular moment. For my own sanity I needed to express my feelings about this, and for the sake of anyone following me I wanted to quickly mention why you might not hear much from me in the coming days.

Sorry, love ya! Ttyl 👋

[ruben-tech]

iPhone XR iOS 18.4 Prueba de Rendimiento & Batería en 2025 🔥

[kameyyy]

now that i‘ve been using an iphone for a few weeks it feels weird using my android 😭