Apple Terminated Epic’s Developer Account

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.

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.🤔
- 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.
- 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.
The only sad thing about this is that only one of them can lose the lawsuit.
- Ehhhh they could both throw endless millions at lawyers for no real result
- 🤣
fight fight fight fight fight fight
oh shit that one is eating a whole lotta sand
But there is a satisfying FAFO aspect to this.
- fabulous amphibian feeling its organ ? fat alluring fungiform obelisk ?
  (I will look this up, it's just a good opportunity to practice my English)
- No kidding. As “that guy” who is siding with Apple on this ….. seems like they’re playing with fire
By their own quote of the law, there's no wording that would stipulate that apple has to allow epic to have their third party app in apples app store. Just that they would have to essentially allow it to be side loaded, or installable in some way onto the phone.
But really, why should and app store have to foot the server bill for another company to get to install an app intended to make money while giving none to the company that owns and operates an app store?
I sure as hell wouldn't.
- Did you read the article?
  Epic is not trying to get their 3rd party app in apples app store.
  Epic can't create a 3rd party app store because Apple revoked their developer license. This means any app epic creates can't be sideloaded because it will never be signed by apple.
  Apples new rules require any 3rd party app store to pay apple $0.50 per install (there is no million app install requirement for 3rd party app stores). So apple would still make money off epics app store if they allowed it.
Out of curiosity, what companies do you love?
Edit: oddly unpopular question lol
Edit2: a lot of people seem to think this question is a statement.
- No company is your friend.
- Probably none, but one can dislike some more than others.
- It's pretty silly to love a company: they're not human and behave as a sociopath would.
  To love a company (which is really just to love their brand) is just to be easilly influenced by marketing and having a tendency to simplify one's view of the world down to labels to make it easier to mentally understand it - in consumer terms it means that when you're making a purchase decision you can just take the mental shortcut in your decision of directly choosing the "loved" brand, rather than needing to evaluate products and their suitability for you to make an informed buying choice, which is cognitivelly more costly.
  While "brand love" is understandable and not abnormal, it's not a quality but rather it's just a pretty flawed cognitive shortcut that goes against making informed choices, so expecting it from others is like expecting that everybody has a specific mild character flaw.
  You do your thing - it's your life and your money - just don't think that others must share that same reductive way of making purchasing decisions.
- Three's
  🎶 Come and knock on my door...🎶
- No corpo
- A company? None. Black diamond's products I own? I love their products like close friends
- I think that’s a fair question, but the answers you’ve gotten is accurate. I don’t really believe that there are any ”good” profit-driven companies.
  Technically companies are just entities and don’t really have any morals assigned to them, good or bad, but they become bad when their increasing strive for profit ends up hurting people. These people could be their workers (like all AAA gaming companies), their customers, or some more or less unrelated third party (like soda companies ruining water sources).
  Since the pandemic, landlord companies in my country have gotten incredibly greedy. They got a sudden massive cash infusion by increasing rents by an absurd amount, so each year since they’ve been asking for equally absurd amounts. Their CEOs are pocketing extreme sums, and then moan about how they don’t get enough money to keep the company afloat.
  They’re trying to circumvent decades of precedence in how rent negotiations work, and it’s threatening the living situation for millions of people. It’s just evil.

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.

They better increase quickly. Apple's bank account is large.
- $2B on day one. Double that every instance. EU will own Apple in a week or two.
Don’t tell him! Corporations being hit with massive fines is my kink!
$2 billion, that's 4 whole days of profits for them.
- $2B is actually 2% of their profit. That's 7.3 days.
- Ah yes but those people love money so much, they are probably devastated.🤪
There's no wording in that law that says apple has to allow third party apps for alternate app stores or anything to be made available within apples app store. More like apple just has to allow sideloading. Why would Apple want to pay for the server expense of another company by-passing giving apple a share of the profits?
I hate both companies, but if I owned Apple, I'd be after doing the same thing. Epic can get people to sodeload that crap.
- You need an Apple developer account to even make software for iOS. Alternate app stores are distributed on the web, not Apple’s App Store. Since an alternative app store is an iOS app, Apple banning Epic’s developer account means they’re banned from making one.

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

And the flat $100 fee, which disproportionately iffects small devs
- 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.
- Everything disproportionately effects the little guy. Just look at laws that have fines instead of jail time. Or just getting a lawyer. Or eating out or buying groceries.
- How is the $100 a obstacle to any legitimate developer? The only one it hurts is those who would otherwise flood the app store with crap submitted from throw away developer accounts.
Every other store charges 30% including Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Google Play, etc. Epic doesn’t and they aren’t profitable, so I don’t know why people pile on Apple.
Edit: the downvotes are funny. Why? You don’t like someone pointing out the truth?
- At least with Google Play and Steam you are not locked into it due to your device of choice.
- This is just a list of shit service providers leeching profits from developers and making the gaming industry worse.
Sucks to be a Steam dev then
- Does it? Steam does not monopolize a platform, or demand exclusivity. With Steam you are 100% free to sell through other channels, and even be able to still use Steam. Also there are actual services on Steam, and there are possibilities for lower rates.
- Steam and AppStore are not equivalent in many important ways, though
- I don't need steam to install your app on my pc, unless you choose it to be that way.
- Replace steam with console and your statement has a fighting chance

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.

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.

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.
- 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.
- We really need all TOS to be enforced fully so we can start pushing back on onerous TOS.
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.
- This isn't some random developer, it's a developer that has already breached a contract with Apple. It's reasonable for Apple to be wary of entering into another contract with them when the CEO is publicly complaining about the terms.
  There's definitely a case to be made that Epic shouldn't need an Apple developer account to make their own app store, but Apple is well within its rights to deny them an account based on their history.
"You did this just to start pushing for what's basically DMA so we think you'll violate us for the DMA again which is already under effect so we ban"?
How did they breach the contract?
- Epic changed the mobile versions of Fortnite to add an option to pay for V-Bucks through their own system, which is against the terms of both Apple's app store and Google's. That got them kicked off of both app stores and then they sued Apple and Google.
Slurping that knob eh

I hope this come to bite them hard.