Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US

These people are implementing Skinner boxes[1] for children.

There are literally "engagement" engineers actively doing A/B tests on children to see what makes them more addicted or gets them to spend more money or time on their platform.

There are humans literally doing experiments on children to figure out what stimulus results in more addicted behavior.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

I think the persistence of advertising is an issue overall. I think we are worse off today now that you get bombarded with targeted ads and there's usually a seamless buy now button displayed within them.

Preying on whales is exploiting psychological issues. New technology certainly does exist today to aid in this exploitation that didn't exist 30 yrs ago.

It's not an issue from time immemorial. it's an issue from the late 19th century, if not post WWII. the child consumer class did not before that. Toys hardly existed before that. Even an adult consume class with disposable income had hardly existed. Kids spending hours every day zonked out at screens is a distinctly new phenomenon on top of that

Well said. Streaming services are finally getting the kinds of commercial content we did in the 80s and 90s. It's refreshing as I feel those years were the golden era of toys. Many toys of the era didn't even have commercials but we still wanted them. X-Men toys for example. If I was a kid, I'd of loved to have seen weekly commercials of the newest line up of X-Men toys.

I feel like you're being disingenuous with your choice of franchise. 30 years ago there were much worse toys. There were capsule machines that randomized what toy your quarter would give you. There were toys that you could buy random assortments at the toy store (M.U.S.C.L.E was one if I remember correctly). You could buy trading cards too. It's not that kids are marketed to (which is arguably its own problem), it's that the randomization is really not good for creatures that utilize associative memories (not sure if other intelligence avenues will be as susceptible to near misses, but likely it's a feature of intelligence in general to be stupid about randomness). And this has only been ratcheted up in the last 30 years.

What you may be missing, if you don't have kids, is just how insidious modern arcades are. They really opened my eyes in a lot of ways to the problem in general, since I just avoid a lot of the other modern invasive gambling mechanics. Most of the games are now just thinly veiled gambling machines. There are a few classics, like pacman still, and they eat quarters, but they are not programmed to randomly modify the game itself. Claw machines these days all have their claw strength randomized and is unknowable value that changes from play to play. And almost all the games I see at kids venues have some similar mechanic.

But it's not just the arcade. The rise of skinner boxes have become ever more weaponized (for lack of a better term?) in the last 30 years, as data collection has become cheaper and easier. I can't even imagine gacha mechanics in any of the games I played 30 years ago. Like, here, send Nintendo a dollar, and you can get a code for a better sword in Dragon Warrior? I would have mailed that dollar faster than you can imagine (I then would have shared the code, so of course this wouldn't work, but still, I would have sent the dollar). And for what? so they can make the games even harder?

This is a real problem beyond just teaching kids to ignore marketing. I don't have a solution other than trying to shield them until they're old enough that they're less likely to develop real addictions.

In Fortnite, skins are available to buy only sometimes. At a given time, you can buy like, 6-7 of them. If you want something that is not up, well, tough luck, it may never come back.

Yes it is evil, considering how the advertisements are made in ways that makes it difficult for parents to escape them.

The only way to escape kids TV shows that have advertisements between shows and advertisements within the shows themselves as product placements is to only watch public television (which is generally funded way less and has way fewer programs than commercial television).

Hell, shows like Transfomers have the toys as the stars of the show.

So now all your kids have the peer pressure of all their friends consuming popular media and owning toys and now you have to be the bad guy saying no to literally everything to escape.

You go to any store and the toys and sugary cereals are right here at eye height of your kids with cartoon characters and promises of prizes, toys, and sweepstakes.

So you’re basically between a rock and a hard place, either you are the “weird kid with the weird parents” or you buy into at least some of that consumerism, trying to approach it with some level of moderation.

The way my favorite boss told me, it was "don't let `great` be the enemy of `good enough.`"

I often say you have to judge people based on their time and the environment around them and you need to encourage whatever good moves you see. In other words, I'll take a greedy bloodsucker over an evil greedy bloodsucker any day.

*Perfect

Why would different business practices shield console makers in the first place, legally speaking? As in, even if all consoles were always sold at a loss, how would that help someone's legal case that they should be excluded here? Does the law state that, "if your business practices are incompatible with antitrust legislation, and you'd end up having to raise prices, shut down, or decrease your CEO's paycheck, if we enforced it on you, then we won't do it" or something along those lines?

Except there are indeed productivity tools for consoles as well, e.g. anything done with UWP on Windows Store can also be targeted to XBox UWP ERA environment.

A class action lawsuit from other developers is inevitable, at least for the time period where Apple took the money after the judgement.

To me it's felt like coasting. Just release very minimal updates each year to all their main products let others die on the vine like HomePods. iOS 18 marquee features were Apple Intelligence and customizing the home screen. One that didn't ship and one that has been a staple of Android since day 1.

Only real advancement I've seen is in Apple Silicon. Which is fantastic but very much on a tik-tok cycle like Intel. Really wish these companies would cut back on constant model upgrades and instead spend more time polishing the products.

> Steve Jobs was quite famously against upgradability since the start. That is not something new for Apple.

And yet during his time we had upgradeable MacBooks and Macs. Heck, even iPhone battery was upgradeable while he was still in charge.

>Spotify is the one who screws everyone. They deserve it

How? They pay the exact same percentage as Steam does to it's creators, 70%.

Beyond the morality of taking money in this situation, Apple soured it's relationship with everyone who makes income off Patreon or other apps with their unstoppable greed.

The idea Apple deserved a cut of Patreon podcaster's monthly subscription fees was beyond the pale.

The entire thing they got contempt of court for was trying to find a way to continue to squeeze customers as long as they can.

This is the Big Tech playbook. Apple and Google know what they're doing isn't legal. But they make so much doing it, that it's worth the lawyer fees to delay and delay and appeal and appeal as long as possible to keep the money train flowing. Historically the fine has never been as big as the profit, so even if they eventually get in trouble for it, it makes sense for them to profit in the short term.

They can just get a presidential pardon for now and all future acts. Companies are people. Unkillable people. Unjailable people. They don't sleep. They have a thousand arms, a thousand eyes, a thousand legs, thousand brains. They get better financing, they can walk away from their financing. I can send unlimited money to politicians. They can exist in a thousand places, countries, legal systems at once.

This is HN, the Church of the Free Market is well represented. If you haven't yet seen someone give the "free markets create competition" speech on Monday and the "my company aims to capture this space and then entrench a monopoly with economies of scale / network effects / platform effects / two sided markets / last mile dynamics" pitch on Tuesday, just hang around HN a bit more. You won't have to wait long.

I think a more interesting question is: who is “self”? US is historically more prone to favor business, while EU seems more concerned in protecting consumers. And of course there is the noise generated by incompetence/corruption/lobbying that makes the question of “in the interest of whom are laws made?” very nuanced.

> who is taking the concept of free markets seriously

The EU. Let me explain, because this was confusing:

In US political debate, free markets have become synonymous with ”let companies do what they want”. Today, most of US ”markets” are neither free, nor (arguably) even markets at all, such as Amazon or health insurance. It is a mix between feudal system and protection racket.

Just like ”freedom isn’t free” in terms of civil liberties, same goes (imo) for markets. If you want to optimize for ”freedom” of markets, that means a non-zero amount of regulating them. This is obvious both in theory and by opening your eyes and looking outside.

As far as how to regulate them, I believe the EU is doing a good job, especially in the face of novel technology and business topologies. Basically, allow everything that isn’t deliberately anti-competitive. Because, drumroll, competition is fundamental for markets to work, at all.

Sorry for the confusion. It’s hard to make points when words mean completely different things in different parts of the world.

I don't know about iOS, but on Android you can just pay through a Google Pay pop-up, you don't need to input any kind of payment information to the app itself. Does iOS not have such a mechanism?

Also don’t forget, only very large companies can make this kind of calculated risk; when the parking ticket isn’t calculated based on your income, the parking ticket for some is just a fee to park while to others it means not making rent that month, the fines stifle competition while the big players can take advantage

I’m no expert, but it may be the case that if you place an app on, say, the EU app store, you’re technically doing business in the EU, not the US, and are therefore subject to EU law, not US law. Wasn’t that the case with the DSA requirements? https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/18/apple-purges-apps-without-...