I'm fine with it if it makes Apple understand that after antagonising every other developer, the AVP is pretty much useless.
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Juno YouTube App for Vision Pro Removed From App Store
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I don't have ads on YouTube. It's one of few services/products I am happy to pay subscription for.
Remember when YouTube used to be revolutionary and ahead of its time??
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In both cases I really don't see what the difference is vs a web browser. How can there be a legal distinction? I guess it's just a TOS violation? Since they can apparently make that as arbitrary and capricious as they want?
Of course, if browsers didn't already exist, the powers that be would find a way to call them illegal due to facilitating copyright infringement.
@ChristianSelig ?
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I deleted a 13 year old account and never looked back. No Apollo, no Reddit for me.
Indeed, he doesn’t care and it is actually better for Reddit. Reddit don’t earn any money from Apollo users while they do increase the cost of Reddit themselves.
Alteast Reddit earns some money from people who use their app by showing ads.
And most importantly, Reddit API change was the result of AI models using the free API to train their models on. Now they need to pay Reddit.
Reddit is not a government agency that is forced to provide it’s services for free to everybody.
Assuming it's the real Christian Selig here, he was clearly referring to finding out by the app being removed, not that he found out on MacRumors. I mean he's quoted all over the original post so he couldn't have learned about it from his own statements in the post!
That’s really the rub here. Running roughshod over developers has repercussions and now they lag with adoption as opposed to the uptake from devs with the phone or iPads. I’d imagine the story around AVP will look similar to if slightly worse than the Mac App Store. That’s sad no matter how you slice it.
I dont know how to make it more clear to you than to use this example I gaveFor me at least, I went in with my eyes open. I knew that these sort of apps never really last forever, and I purchased them with the mentality that I would be fine even if they went away the next day.
Second, these apps aren’t exactly stealing customers away from the parent companies, any more than an iPhone case maker is “stealing” business away from Apple. Or do you think that only Apple should be allowed to release cases for their smartphones?
A large part of this is because these are indie developers who make the time and effort to create apps that both look great and work great. They show more love and care for their craft than a multi-billion-dollar company and I want to support and encourage them to continue doing what they do, and buying their apps is really the only way I know how to show my support.
Which is in large part why I am also an Apple user. They make products which look great and work great and this is how I show my seal of approval. I like to pay for nice things.
I was a Tweetbot and Apollo user. Prior to this, I also paid for a third party instagram ipad app (fastfeed) that was eventually discontinued when instagram locked their API access. I also paid for protube (another third party YouTube app) that I got a good half a year of use out of before it too got gutted.
Currently, I am also subscribed to Play and Reeder. Both of which allow me to subscribe to YouTube via RSS and play their videos inside the app. Again, are these apps in violation of YouTube’s T&C?
Play: Save Videos Watch Later
A powerful, award-winning app for bookmarking and organizing videos to watch later. Critically acclaimed by The Verge, Daring Fireball, 9to5Mac, MacStories, Mac Power Users, iMore, AppAdvice, and more. The Verge: “This is so much better than trying to manage a library in the YouTube app”...apps.apple.com
Reeder.
Reeder is your all-in-one inbox for reading, watching and listening to content from various sources. From Unread Counts to Timeline Syncing Say goodbye to unread counts! With Reeder, your timeline position is synced across all your devices, letting you pick up right where you left off. Shared...
And if they go away one day, so be it. I won’t be requesting for refunds. I won’t be complaining about it here. Maybe I will buy them a beer as a show of solidarity.
What laws am I breaking exactly? Or helping to break?
This dude is such a one trick pony. He makes a third-party client which is against the terms of service, the company he is leeching off of shuts him down after VERY generous warning, then he cries about it. It's annoying, I don't know why anyone would bother downloading his apps at this point.
Reddit had no issue with him for years. He wasn't "leeching" off of anyone. They allowed 3rd party apps. I believe they still have a few. They got jealous that he was a much better developer than their entire team was combined. His app was much, much better and he was a one person dev.
He was leeching of Reddit. And 3rd party apps are still allowed, they simply have to pay for how much they use. Someone has to pay for the server costs Apollo generates, and it sure isn't Reddit as they don't make any money of Apollo users.
If they allow it, it isn't leeching. Secondly, other 3rd parties are still around because they don't have the users to cost them much money. Christian said his cost would be in the millions with how popular Apollo was.
He was leeching as he was making money (millions) of Reddit while not paying for the server costs. And 3rd party apps are now subscription based, where users have to pay $3.99 per month. That's all Apollo had to do like other 3rd party apps that are still around.
Again, Reddit allowed it. They literally gave APIs to 3rd party apps to use. It's their own fault if they didn't charge, not Christian's. Apollo users use MUCH more bandwidth than other 3rd party apps. A subscription with Apollo would be way too expensive just for him to break even.
These are 3rd party apps that are similar to Apollo, they have the same bandwidth. And no, I did the calculation back then which showed that charging $5 would make him an easy profit already, which turns out to be true as similar apps like Apollo are now charging $3.99 per month.
Whether Reddit allowed it or not, doesn't change the fact that he was a leech. And this is why Reddit shut it down as they didn't intend the API to be used this way.
Because it’s not a Google problem. It’s apple’s problem. If you want YouTube on Vision Pro then bombard apple about it. It’s their platform.
Apple also highlighted Juno as an example of a high quality vision app. All of a sudden Apple had no reason to negotiate with YouTube. Heck Apple is even making 30% knowing this will eventually get disputed later.
Do you think Apple would stand for one second to see someone make apps and profit on them that provide its services on other platforms? You’re dreaming.
Paraphrasing your own take:
Personally, I don’t think what Google is doing is unfair or unreasonable. They are willing to go the extra mile in designing their own products to work well together precisely because they know there is a large user base who are willing to offer their data and attention for advertising. Or pay for subscriptions. Offering this integration on competing platforms would remove a unique selling point for their own, and what’s the incentive for Google to continue developing their own AR products up if they are forced to share YouTube integration with everybody else, which would in turn impact their ability to monetise their own AR platform?”
…and their service are - de facto - integrated on basically every Android smartphone available to consumers (save for a few markets where they might not be, due to political reasons.
The Apple Vision Pro is not an established platform - it‘s a nascent platform.
And there’s little reason for Google to prop it up, when they may be developing a competing platform.
👉 YouTube is not Maps.
Apple is not going to compete with YouTube with their own social video platform by publishing user-generated content.
Also, I think you‘re getting things wrong here: Google arguably may have made a huge mistake by supporting a competing platform - the iPhone - with their Maps service so early on.
👉 Do you believe the iPhones would have become so successful a platform, were it not precisely for its Google Maps support?
A Maps application arguably was one of the most useful apps on the iPhone early on - and one of the best reasons to get one in the first place. And while Google was market-leading back then already, Apple did not have a competitive Maps service in 2007, 2010 or even 2015. Had Google not propped up iOS early on, they (Android) may have captured an even bigger part of the smartphone OS market back then!
Who would have bought iPhones without a “good” Map application available?
Easy solution. Don’t use Reddit. I turned my back on them when they screwed Apollo.
They did not get "jealous" of him. Get real. They tolerated him and other third-party apps despite their TOS, and in an effort to make their IPO more appealing they started maximizing profit, which means bye-bye easy ad free clients.
The only reason third-party clients exist officially today are for accessibility reasons or because they paid the cost. You can argue Apollo was a better app but that doesn't mean reddit wanted it. Reddit has shown in the past that they will acquire software that they think is worth acquiring. I don't even like Reddit and even I could see from the situation that Christian shot himself in the foot twice with his buyout proposal. The reason he won't do it with Google is because Google will crack the whip and I really doubt this app made him anywhere near as much as Apollo did
It's hard to argue what could have been. I can only base my arguments on what has actually happened, and it does seem like 10+ years later, Apple has handled the removal of google maps pretty well. Google could have played along and remained the pre-installed default on my iPhone, yet instead I am content using Maps, which is pretty fully featured here in Singapore (and maybe falling back on google maps only at times when Maps doesn't suffice, such as Asian countries like Indonesia).
Also, I suspect that at the time, smartphones were still new enough that Apple may just have been able to get away without a maps app (or at least, a fully-featured mapping solution at the time). The strength of their fanbase could have bought them enough time to come up with their own, and it would still be the same outcome today. Again, speaking from experience, my first iPhone was the 4s, and Google Maps was already fairly crippled by then, and even then, I rarely had a need for a native maps app because I don't drive and the smartphone wasn't yet so integrated into my daily life.
For me at least, I would still have gotten an iPhone regardless. Maps or no Maps.
Well, YouTube can still be viewed in Safari, and the Play App is available. So there is at least still a way of accessing and playing YouTube videos.
Play: Save Videos Watch Later
A powerful, award-winning app for bookmarking and organizing videos to watch later. Critically acclaimed by The Verge, Daring Fireball, 9to5Mac, MacStories, Mac Power Users, iMore, AppAdvice, and more. The Verge: “This is so much better than trying to manage a library in the YouTube app”...
apps.apple.com
This is also why I support Apple having their own music streaming service. If Spotify doesn't want to play ball, well, no biggie for Apple.
And who knows. Maybe one day, we may get another service for easily accessing spatial video content, though hosting costs may be an issue. Either way, it's still early days, and I wouldn't count Apple, or the Vision Pro, out of the game just yet.
The vast majority of apps in the App Store are either free or ad-supported and make Apple no money. So yes, plenty already are.
Yeah, and Reddit provided a free API for devs to use, Apollo only charged money to use the software wrapper around the API, it never profited from ADs.
Juno used the free web view and just wrapped around it. It didn't bypass youtube's Ads, and you still need YouTube premium to view high res videos. Then it charges for the effort to build a web plugin. This is essentially the same if you were to pay a Tampermonkey script that beautifies your YouTube web page. If people are willing to pay, I don't see any problem with that.
Those two apps never scraped the website for content illegally.