ransomware alone costs the global economy hundreds of billions of dollars every year.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

ransomware alone costs the global economy hundreds of billions of dollars every year. remote-access trojans ruin lives and literally drive people to suicide. if you think you are too smart to ever click on a bad app, you are mistaken.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

apple, google, & microsoft have bolted some annoying surveillance and social-control shit onto the side of their solutions to these problems. those solutions are complex and their merits are absolutely debatable. in some cases the medicine may in fact be worse than the disease. but if your contention is that the trillion-dollar scale life-destroying problems that these flawed solutions are addressing *don't need solving* you are a very silly person who should not be in charge of any computers

[wuest@hachyderm.io]

@glyph you're good people, and you're fighting the good fight, friend.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@wuest I really want to be having a nuanced conversation about the specific mechanisms and the ways we might influence vendors to better balance security and freedom, and instead I'm just yelling at people that The App Store Is Good Actually all the time and I really do not like inhabiting that role

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@glyph @wuest have you considered doing that instead

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@aeva @wuest I do my best and this thread is itself an attempt to reframe the parameters of the discussion, but when too many of my erstwhile interlocutors do not believe in the need for institutions at all, there's no room to talk about how the institutions might be made better

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@glyph @wuest I don't think apple is going to let go of this policy any sooner than they're going to stop making you have to rent your ability to write software or the huge cut they take. they make so much money off this policy. it's going to be there forever. you don't need to lick their boots

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@aeva @wuest okay let's break down this claim.

"they make so much money off this policy":

https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/06/06/apple-now-has-over-34-million-registered-developers

34 million registered developers means $99/year from 34 million people, which means $3,366MM per year. Which sure sounds like a lot. But if you look at their latest 10-K, their gross margin on Services is $109,158MM which would mean if developer support overhead is 0 (spoiler it is not 0) it would account for 3% of their services revenue.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@glyph @wuest please don't

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@aeva @wuest and that's exactly why it's not possible to have the more nuanced conversation. people have big piles of false beliefs about how this system works, and are not interested in hearing about its details

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@glyph @wuest no, the conversation with the nuance never happened, and you said as much yourself already https://mastodon.social/@glyph/115615590410167805

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@aeva @wuest this _is_ the more nuanced conversation. if we want to understand if it's possible to influence apple to change their policy one thing to understand is whether it brings in a material amount of money or whether it grants them a material amount of competitive control. but also, if you want to operate a better, parallel system, it's helpful to understand the sort of scale you might need to operate at and what its costs are.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@aeva @wuest however, you are under no obligation to entertain my hobbyhorse of a topic and I should probably just go to sleep anyway. just because this is the conversation I wish were coming up instead, doesn't mean others are under an obligation to provide me with it

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@glyph sleep well