Relevance
“complains when other companies want to control their own service.”
This is the relevance. He made no complaint. He just provided an explanation for anybody interested in the development of Juno on his personal blog. Stating he wouldn’t fight Google on this.
Admittance
“The short of it is that, while no issues with ad-blocking were presented, they did take issue with a few areas, firstly that Juno is in violation of the YouTube API Terms of Service, and secondly that Juno alludes to YouTube trademarks and iconography. Both of these issues were very puzzling.
For the first issue, as I mentioned, Juno makes no use of the YouTube API so it’s unclear to me how it could be in violation of it. Juno operates in much the same way a browser extension would through CSS and JavaScript. Google’s own Chrome both has native support for browser extensions, and even has native features that
customize the styling and experience of webpages. They also mentioned they did not like that Juno uses the embed player,
despite Google themselves having a library showing this as the preferred way to integrate YouTube videos into apps.“
He made no admittance of violating terms of service. As I said Google didn’t like his implementation. He didn’t believe he was in violation of their terms and tried to make changes to satisfy the big G.
Random Guess
“I suspect Christian knew this was going to get shutdown”
Allowed/Relevance again
The relevance is that your point in the debate centre's around the argument that third parties shouldn’t run on the success of another company. Whether it’s sensible to build your business around the success of a different company is a separate question. But Apollo was and is allowed (but can no longer afford to operate). And taken at face value, per YouTube‘s own technical guidelines, Juno is seemingly operating in line with them. Google however believe otherwise. Christian tried to work with them to resolve their differences but it hasn’t worked out. That’s unfortunate.
The way I look at this is that Christian built his app, apparently in good faith based on the technical guidelines that are published in the YouTube API terms. Neither of us can know his intention of course. But by definition using the YouTube API is also “allowed” and he built an app around it. It’s a far cry from malicious and intentional breaches of developer guidelines. For instance Epic surreptitiously installing third party payment processing within Fortnite was knowing and malicious. That was a clear ploy to bait Apple so that Epic could file its lawsuit.
Right to charge
I actually don’t disagree with you on Reddit‘s right to charge and to charge whatever the hell they want. It’s their business. But it’s unfortunate that they chose to introduce such high pricing at such a late stage in the game. Because it was users who lost out in the end.
Imagine a world where Apple didn’t charge a commission at the launch of the App Store in 2008; then suddenly decided to introduce a 27% commission in 2024. It would fundamentally break the business models of tons of apps that we know and love today. But fortunately those commissions were priced in from day 1 and consumers and developers were able to decide if they should go into business and buy from Apple or not. Reddit did the reverse of that as was their right. But it doesn’t alter the reality that users are the ones who lost out. Purely because a sole trader built something in good faith and got priced out.
AI on pricing
You may be right on AI scraping being priced in. Who knows what the exact impact of data scraping is on Reddit’s bottom line. If that was or is the case, it would have been helpful if Reddit was transparent about that at the time. At least then the pricing would have genuinely seemed understandable. And I think that would have assuaged most of the backlash to be honest. Or at least re-directed it to Open AI, Meta, Google and co.
apps.apple.com
