this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/10062367

Apple Terminated Epic’s Developer Account

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[–] dojan 249 points 9 months ago (30 children)

Lmao. I’ve no love for Apple, and even less for Epic. It’s like two grotesquely unlovable toddlers are throwing a hissy fit in their little sandbox and I’m here for it.

[–] Buffalox 141 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Yes, it's kind of funny with Epic complaining about fairness, when they arrange exclusivity agreements for their own game store. 🤪 And they actively sabotage it working on Linux.🤔

[–] deweydecibel 83 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Regardless of the irony, someone needed to start this fight with Apple, so it might as well be them.

Between the two of them, I'm not willing to "support" either, but I'm slightly more inclined to hope Epic comes out on top because they're not also in a hardware dominance position. Epic can be as shitty as it likes about certain platforms, but they at least can only affect their games. They aren't gatekeepers to a massive audience of users, and by far one of the largest gates at that. The Epic store actually has competition.

Between an abusive developer and an abusive gatekeeper, the gatekeeper is the bigger issue.

[–] Buffalox 40 points 9 months ago

Regardless of the irony, someone needed to start this fight with Apple,

Absolutely.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (10 children)

Ok, I really don't get Epic hate. Sure, they're using shitty practices to attempt to compete with the megolith Valve is, and it sucks. However, how are they sabotaging it working on Linux. They made Easy Anti-cheat work on Linux, which is huge, and also UE5 seems to run better on Linux than Windows by most accounts I've heard, including my own experience.

Make reasonable complaints all day, but sabotaging Linux compatability is not something they're doing.

[–] Giooschi 13 points 9 months ago (3 children)

However, how are they sabotaging it working on Linux.

For example they discontinued support for Rocket League on Linux (and Mac) after buying Psyonix.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 9 months ago (2 children)

The only sad thing about this is that only one of them can lose the lawsuit.

[–] Cypher 10 points 9 months ago

Ehhhh they could both throw endless millions at lawyers for no real result

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago

fight fight fight fight fight fight

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[–] Buffalox 108 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

Wow, they do this just 2 days after being fined $2 billion by EU!
Unless you don't know this "Tim Apple", those fines have a tendency to increase with repeated violations.

[–] [email protected] 69 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

They better increase quickly. Apple's bank account is large.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago (1 children)

$2B on day one. Double that every instance. EU will own Apple in a week or two.

[–] Crack0n7uesday 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

They'll just stop selling their products in the EU before that bridge is even on the horizon.

[–] PlutoniumAcid 18 points 9 months ago (6 children)

What's not to love? Then do the same with Suckerberg please, kthxbye.

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[–] dojan 18 points 9 months ago

Don’t tell him! Corporations being hit with massive fines is my kink!

[–] farcaster 12 points 9 months ago (10 children)

$2 billion, that's 4 whole days of profits for them.

[–] Aux 26 points 9 months ago

$2B is actually 2% of their profit. That's 7.3 days.

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[–] SinningStromgald 65 points 9 months ago (20 children)

Sucks to be an iOS developer. Apple will never give up it's 30% of your money. EVER.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 9 months ago (24 children)

And the flat $100 fee, which disproportionately iffects small devs

[–] SkyezOpen 52 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I took an app development course in college. Everything was android and I tested on my own device, except one project had to be on apple. I managed to snag an ancient iPhone off a friend to test, but no, turns out you need a dev account to even be able to load your own code on your phone. Fuck apple forever.

[–] reddig33 21 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Dev accounts are free. It’s only when you want to post stuff to the store that you start paying.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (12 children)

You mean when you want to make it available to download in the only way Apple makes possible? It's not like you can just send the apk to someone to run on their iPhone, if you want to share the app with others on an iPhone, you have to use the Apple App Store, you have to pay them $100 + the cost of an Apple computer. Just to share your FOSS app with your friends.

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[–] SkyezOpen 12 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Did this change? It was about a decade ago. I could develop and test on an emulated device, but testing on hardware was 100% locked behind a $100 paywall.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago

Thought it was just going to be one of those nothing burger cases where they only lost the license because someone forgot to renew something and was surprised that it actually isn't that.

Fuck Epic but they have a point.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (7 children)

Apple said one of the reasons they terminated our developer account only a few weeks after approving it was because we publicly criticized their proposed DMA compliance plan. Apple cited this X post from this thread written by Tim Sweeney. Apple is retaliating against Epic for speaking out against Apple’s unfair and illegal practices, just as they’ve done to other developers time and time again.

Epic breached the terms of its agreements with Apple and Google to kick off its lawsuits against them in 2020, and now that Sweeney is openly complaining about Apple's terms for third-party app stores Apple doesn't trust Epic not to breach those too. Seems reasonable.

[–] deweydecibel 39 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Seems reasonable.

Careful. There are quite a few terms of service that you've agreed to over the years that if certain aspects of them were enforced, you wouldn't think they were very reasonable.

I honestly don't know why there are so many people around here willing to back apple on this kind of shit. Who cares if they had the right to do it? The inherent problem here is that they had that right, when they really shouldn't.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

Careful. There are quite a few terms of service that you’ve agreed to over the years that if certain aspects of them were enforced, you wouldn’t think they were very reasonable.

Epic has an entire legal department to read over agreements like that, and yet they deliberately breached the terms. That's hugely different from someone unknowingly breaching a TOS that they didn't read.

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[–] tigerjerusalem 34 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Please clarify it to me because I read this debacle as Apple blackmailing developers HARD into not talking bad things about the company. I get they're evil and petty but I'm having a hard time to believe they're this childish and stupid, specially with the DMA knocking at their doors.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

I hope this come to bite them hard.

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