ParadiseLost
Well-known member
The real reason they cut the chargers is because it saves an insane amount on shipping costs.
BBC said:EC and US regulators have a series of ongoing investigations into Apple's App Store including more widely considering whether the 30% commission it charges for in-app purchases is fair.
Developers have become increasingly frustrated by the so-called Apple tax.
Under pressure from both developers and regulators, Apple has cut its commission rate to 15% for any developer than earns less than £1m in annual revenue.
A complaint was filed to the EC by e-commerce firm Rakuten in March 2020, alleging that it was anti-competitive to take a commission on e-books sold through the App Store while promoting its own Apple Books service. This case will be looked at separately.
Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite, also filed a similar complaint as part of an ongoing dispute with Apple over its 30% cut on in-app purchases.
Toms Guide said:Nonetheless, privacy advocates feel like they’re making a difference. “Even if they don't ultimately nix the plan, we're forcing them to do the work they should've done by consulting us all along,” tweeted Stanford University surveillance researcher Riana Pfefferkorn. “Keep pushing.”
Most recently, Apple VP of software engineering Craig Federighi told the Wall Street Journal that Apple’s new policies are “much more private than anything that's been done in this area before.”
“We, who consider ourselves absolutely leading on privacy, see what we are doing here as an advancement of the state of the art in privacy, as enabling a more private world,” he said. Adding that the system had been developed “in the most privacy-protecting way we can imagine and in the most auditable and verifiable way possible,” he painted the company’s solution as preferable to its cloud storage rivals, which look and analyze “every single photo.”
Apple Suffers Loss in Lawsuit Against Security Experts
Tech giant Apple has suffered a loss in its recent lawsuit against a security start-up that offered "virtual" iPhones to researchers for testing purposes. The judge wrote that Apple's copyright claims were "puzzling, if not disingenuous."www.breitbart.com
Apple lost a lawsuit against a security startup named Corellium that offered "virtual iPhones" to research groups that could be used to find bugs in their software. Florida Judge Rodney Smith threw out Apple's lawsuit which was based on copyright violations for being "puzzling, if not disengenious" due to the fact that Corellium heavily vetted all of its customers and Apple actually made an attempt at purchasing the security company back in 2018 before negotiations fell through. The Judge determined Corelliums operations constituted fair use.
9to5mac said:The Cupertino-based company continued to seek an injunction to stop Corellium from selling virtual iOS devices, but now Apple has decided to drop the case.
MarketWatch said:In a proposed settlement of a 2019 class-action lawsuit from developers, Apple agreed to allow app makers to direct their consumers to payment options outside the App Store, which could allow them to avoid paying fees of up to 30% that Apple charges developers for online purchases in iOS apps. The company also agreed to a democratic approach to the App Store’s search function, greater pricing freedom and an annual transparency report about the companies’ app-review policies and their effects.
Perhaps the biggest concession from Apple would let developers finally communicate directly with customers about alternative payment options, with their permission, using information collected inside their apps.
The changes apply to developers worldwide — not just small developers in the U.S. covered by the settlement.
The fees charged to developers, and the rules Apple has enforced that require Apple’s payment option be used in apps with no direction to other payment options, were at the heart of a separate lawsuit, Epic Games Inc. v. Apple. That landmark antitrust case, brought by the maker of the “Fortnite” videogame, is being decided by the same judge who will now weigh this proposal, with a ruling in the Epic case expected soon.
Reuters said:"The Commission shut its eyes to the real competitive dynamic in this industry, that between Apple and Android," Google's lawyer Meredith Pickford told the court.
"By defining markets too narrowly and downplaying the potent constraint imposed by the highly powerful Apple, the Commission has mistakenly found Google to be dominant in mobile operating systems and app stores, when it was in fact a vigorous market disrupter," he said.
Pickford said Android "is an exceptional success story of the power of competition in action".
Commission lawyer Nicholas Khan dismissed Apple's role because of its small market share compared with Android.
"Bringing Apple into the picture doesn't change things very much. Google and Apple pursue different models," he told the court.
Khan cited Google's agreements which forced phone manufacturers to pre-install Google Search, the Chrome browser and the Google Play app store on their Android devices, and payments to pre-install only Google Search as conduct that did not allow for competition.
He said Google's dominance as an incumbent and the immense barriers for rivals resulted in "a virtuous circle for Google but a vicious circle for anybody else".
Android, free for device makers to use, is found on about 80% of the world's smartphones. The case is the most important of the European Union's three cases against Google because of Android's market power. Google has racked up more than 8 billion euros in EU antitrust fines in the last decade.
Apple has, at China's request, removed the Bible and the Quran from their app store. This is rather notable because the guy in charge of the removal, Tim Cook, was rather outspoken in his criticism of Trump over the "Muslim Ban" but became rather compliant when it was China doing rather more than shutting down flights temporarily.
MSN
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The Register said:The complaint [PDF], filed in Northern California District Court on behalf of plaintiff Julie Cima, claims Apple captures iPhone customer data despite device settings declaring a preference that information should not be shared.
"Apple records consumers’ personal information and activity on its consumer mobile devices and applications ('apps'), even after consumers explicitly indicate through Apple’s mobile device settings that they do not want their data and information shared," the complaint, filed this week, says. "This activity amounts to an enormous wealth of data that Apple collects and uses for its financial gain."
The legal filing cites research published last November by a two-person firm developer team called Mysk that claimed Apple collects analytics data even when iPhone users have set a preference disallowing data collection. Those claims led to a similar sueball shortly after they appeared, and to another such case filed earlier this month.