Technology

Since someone else brought up superapps, do they seem like an initial attempt to get around the manufacturer's app store lock-in?

Super apps allow adding mini apps. Seems like an app store.

The goog/apple app stores are already saturated by malware, I can't imagine some mini app store would do better. Even if the big two did do a better job, how would they go about vetting all the code these super apps might have access to?

I guess I'm too jaded, but it seems like just another malware loader you intentionally install.

Am I being too hard on the concept? Are there any really good ones you've used?

I don't think this lawsuit is going to make a difference.

The Verge has such a hard on for this story. They’ve published like ten articles about it already.

Here's the full complaint, for those who want to read the whole thing.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

United States v. Apple is a lawsuit written for the general public, an 88-page press release designed to be read aloud on cable news shows.

That’s not against the rules — note that United States v. Google (filed 2023) has a single, terse intro paragraph outside the numbered section — but US v. Apple powers up for two whole pages before getting into allegations.

There are even a beguiling few paragraphs in which the DOJ compares the need to regularly update AAA video game titles to the onerous process of App Store review and then concludes that “Apple’s conduct made cloud streaming apps so unattractive to users that no developer designed one for the iPhone.” At no point does the DOJ allege that Apple is why I can’t play AAA games on my iPhone….

(At the Thursday press conference, Attorney General Merrick Garland made no mention of how Sarah Jeong would like to see the SE return to its 2016 size.)

It’s fun to engage with the legal distillation of nerd rage at the line level, but there’s also an overarching narrative here that the DOJ is trying to push, one with potentially enormous ramifications.

Meanwhile, the opening volley in its battle against one of America’s favorite companies is a killer start, not least in part because of an unusual degree of lawyerly insight into the human psyche.

The original article contains 1,258 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!