German Watchdog Probes Apple's Market Dominance (bbc.com) 16
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Apple is under investigation by the German competition watchdog. The Federal Cartel Office (FCO) said the initial investigation will look at whether the company is of "paramount significance across markets." Apple said it looked forward to "having an open dialogue" with the FCO about any of its concerns. In a statement, Andreas Mundt, President of the FCO, said it would examine whether with iOS Apple had created "a digital ecosystem around its iPhone that extends across several markets." He added that a focus of the investigation would be the App Store, "as it enables Apple in many ways to influence the business activities of third parties."
Depending on the outcome of its investigation, the FCO said it would look in more detail at specific practices of Apple, in a possible further proceeding. The FCO said it had received various complaints alleging anti-competitive practices, which a further probe could consider. The watchdog noted that App developers had criticized "the mandatory use of Apple's own in-app purchase system and the 30% commission rate associated with this." It had also received a complaint from the advertising and media industry about restrictions on user tracking in iOS 14.5, the watchdog said. The FCO said it would establish contact, where necessary, with the European Commission, which is currently investigating how App Store policies affect music streaming. In response, Apple said the "iOS app economy" supported more than 250,000 jobs in Germany. It added that the App Store had given "German developers of all sizes the same opportunity to share their passion and creativity with users around the world, while creating a secure and trusted place for customers to download the apps they love with the privacy protections they expect."
Depending on the outcome of its investigation, the FCO said it would look in more detail at specific practices of Apple, in a possible further proceeding. The FCO said it had received various complaints alleging anti-competitive practices, which a further probe could consider. The watchdog noted that App developers had criticized "the mandatory use of Apple's own in-app purchase system and the 30% commission rate associated with this." It had also received a complaint from the advertising and media industry about restrictions on user tracking in iOS 14.5, the watchdog said. The FCO said it would establish contact, where necessary, with the European Commission, which is currently investigating how App Store policies affect music streaming. In response, Apple said the "iOS app economy" supported more than 250,000 jobs in Germany. It added that the App Store had given "German developers of all sizes the same opportunity to share their passion and creativity with users around the world, while creating a secure and trusted place for customers to download the apps they love with the privacy protections they expect."
I say let Apple do it's thing (Score:4, Interesting)
XCode is such a bloated pita I download the
So I manually remove it from Applications. There are over 300+ thousand files in XCode? if you drag it to the trash it takes forever to even remove it, So now I just use terminal.
Sure Apple looks great now. But underneath I wonder if they are just a rotten core with a shiny shell. I used to picture Apple as having pretty good stuff just pricey as hell. But now I see them as consumer shiny on the outside with a rotten bloated core. I am trying to pass off my Apple development because I would rather be writing other code and working on my other fun projects vs their point and click click click XCode IDE crap. And I don't even want to start ranting about the crap s$#t Storyboard.
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Xcode was pretty good back when it was Project Builder. But they tried to integrate too much other functionality into it, and resulting in software that never really quite worked right. I mean, the IB integration was great, but they didn't fully take the time to work out all of those bugs before they dumped a giant steaming pile of code signing/App Store sign-in crap into it, and broke things to the point where if anything stops working, you'll spend days trying to figure out why.
But it was Swift support
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On at least half a dozen occasions, I've been forced to mass delete the user data out of the inside of an Xcode project because Xcode froze on opening the project otherwise. The English language lacks words to adequately describe how I feel about Xcode.
Re: I say let Apple do it's thing (Score:2)
So yeah, Xcode is borderline unusable for large projects now, and has been for at least two or three years. At this point, I think they've passed the point where the right thing to do would be to pull the plug and rewrite Xcode from scratch, and are rapidly approaching "Nuke it from orbit; it's the only way to be sure" territory.
Even though this continues an offtopic thread, I need to comment on this.
Perhaps Apple agrees with you; which could be why they were teasing "XCode Cloud" at WWDC 2021.
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So yeah, Xcode is borderline unusable for large projects now, and has been for at least two or three years. At this point, I think they've passed the point where the right thing to do would be to pull the plug and rewrite Xcode from scratch, and are rapidly approaching "Nuke it from orbit; it's the only way to be sure" territory.
Even though this continues an offtopic thread, I need to comment on this.
Perhaps Apple agrees with you; which could be why they were teasing "XCode Cloud" at WWDC 2021.
Xcode Cloud is a continuous build system, not an IDE. In other words, it's a replacement for Xcode Server, not for Xcode, at least as I understand it.
And don't get me started on Xcode Server. My one experience with that tool was so bad that I vowed to rewrite it from scratch if I were ever forced to use it again. Basically, it got to a point after a period of time where it would just stop running tests (even after a reboot), at which point you either wiped the machine and rebuilt it from scratch or you s
Re: (Score:2)
So yeah, Xcode is borderline unusable for large projects now, and has been for at least two or three years. At this point, I think they've passed the point where the right thing to do would be to pull the plug and rewrite Xcode from scratch, and are rapidly approaching "Nuke it from orbit; it's the only way to be sure" territory.
Even though this continues an offtopic thread, I need to comment on this.
Perhaps Apple agrees with you; which could be why they were teasing "XCode Cloud" at WWDC 2021.
Xcode Cloud is a continuous build system, not an IDE. In other words, it's a replacement for Xcode Server, not for Xcode, at least as I understand it.
And don't get me started on Xcode Server. My one experience with that tool was so bad that I vowed to rewrite it from scratch if I were ever forced to use it again. Basically, it got to a point after a period of time where it would just stop running tests (even after a reboot), at which point you either wiped the machine and rebuilt it from scratch or you set up a hack to send a HUP to some daemon every time you push a new version to the source repository, to force it to start a build and test run.
If anything, I'd expect that all that extra Xcode Cloud functionality will make Xcode even more bloated and unreliable, but at least there's some small chance that the CI system will be usable. Then again, if it craps itself the way Xcode Server does, it will be impossible for end users to fix it, so I can only hope that it is a complete from-scratch rewrite, rather than a port of Xcode Server to their server farm....
I hope you are right, and this is not an attempt to put ALL of Xcode into the Cloud (I would imagine so that iPadOS could be used for Xcode Development).
But actually, it sounds like it might be a good thing. If they can remove the Continuous Build stuff from Xcode itself, then it sounds like a major PITA XCode performance-robber might "go" along with it.
Re: I say let Apple do it's thing (Score:2)
I write iOS applications using XCode in Swift as well as other languages/projects, lets just say XCode is not my preferred development environment.
Mods: Interesting? More like Offtopic!
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I wish Apple would take a year off the design treadmills, and just do a complete refactor cycle. No features, just security fixes, performance fixes, fixing fundamental items to macOS/iOS/iPadOS, and cleaning out all the technological debt they have built up since the Darwin days.
Xcode comes to mine as a primary thing, but there are a ton of other things that Apple can do under the hood to make life easier, especially as Apple transitions away from Intel to their ARM stuff.
It just doesn't. (Score:2)
Gee... whatever happened to Apple's one stated reason to buy their products, "It just works"? Are the zombies ready to embrace "It just doesn't"?
Apple dominates the market because (Score:2)
other device makers give zero fucks, CHOSE to make Android a tire fire by inflicting idiotic bloatware on victims, and do not care about user experience.
It's not a matter of Apple being good, it's a matter of their desktop/device competitors being fragmented by choice, indifferent to user experience by choice, and thus chasing customers toward Apple.
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In Europe Android phones dominate the Smartphone market, but the app market is not dominated by Google because other stores exist, and apps can be loaded without it
Apple are being investigated because it is a closed market with no other options and apple actively profits from and controls the market
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Apple (Score:1)