#A+ iOS app

[heartzforyouxoxo]

hot girls have a deep connection w their fave bra

[slocotion]

Just posted this to instagram so I'll share it here too. Disappointing but not surprised.

And to have the audacity to have a "cover the apple fees yourself" option - might as well change the text on that button to "go fuck yourself small creators".

Anyway, DON'T sign up to any patreon pages via the iOS app, just do it via a web browser 😇👌

[14dayswithyou]

There's recently been an overwhelming demand for it (on Itch especially), and I'm happy to look into creating an APK version for Android users!

However, please keep in mind that I will still prioritise PC/Mac/Linux builds above everything else — so any future Android builds may be a little behind in receiving major updates. This will also be extremely experimental!!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Apple faces criminal sanctions for defying App Store antitrust order

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND TODAY (May 2), and in WELLINGTON TOMORROW (May 3). More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.

Epic, makers of the wildly popular Fortnite video-game, have waged a one-company war against the "app tax" – the 15-30% rake that the mobile duopoly of Apple/Google take out of every penny we spend inside of apps.

Epic's own digital practices are hardly spotless: just this year, the company was caught cheating players – many of them children – with deceptive practices and had to refund over $72m:

https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/fortnite-refunds

But in this fight, Epic is on the side of the angels. The 30% that Apple/Google sucks out of the mobile economy is a brutal tax, and not just on app makers. Patreon performers recently raised a stink when the company announced that it would be clawing back 30% of the money pledged by their supporters – that 30% surcharge is passed straight through to Apple/Google:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/12/24218629/patreon-membership-ios-30-percent-apple-tax

From independent news outlets to crafters selling their work out of small storefronts, all the way up to massive entertainment services like Disney Plus and Fortnite, the mobile cartel takes 30% out of every dollar, a racket they maintain with onerous rules that ban apps from using their own payment processors, or even from encouraging users to click a link that brings them to a web-based payment screen.

30% is a gigantic markup on payment processing. It's ten times the going rate for payments in the USA, already one of the most expensive places in the world to transfer money from one party to another. In the EU, payment processing typically runs 1%…or less.

But crafters, Patreon podcasters and small-town newspapers are in no position to fight Google and Apple. Instead, we get Epic, a multi-billion-dollar company that's gone to the mattresses to fight these multi-trillion-dollar companies. Personally, I dote on billionaire-on-trillionaire violence.

Epic was wildly successful. It mopped up the floor with Google, securing an especially punitive award from a judge who was furious that Google had destroyed evidence:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger

Epic also won against Apple, though not as thoroughly as it had with Google, because Apple had the commonsense not to get up to the kind of shenanigans that make federal judges very, very mad. In the Google case, the court found that Google had acted as a monopolist and ordered it to open up the payment system in Google Play, a direct blow to the Android app tax.

In the Apple case, the judge did not find that Google had acted as a monopolist, but did rule that the App Store's payment processing racket violated the law, and ordered Apple to end its own app tax:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/30/epic-games-just-scored-a-major-win-against-apple/

That's where things get gnarly. Apple is addicted to corrupt sources of income – like the tens of billions it illegally receives every year in bribes from Google make it the default search:

https://apnews.com/article/google-antitrust-search-engine-verdict-apple-319a61f20fb11510097845a30abaefd8

And it really, really loves the app tax. When the EU ordered Apple to allow third-party app stores (as a way of killing the app tax), the company cooked up a malicious compliance plan that was comically corrupt:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

So, the mere fact that a federal judge had ordered Apple to open up its app store to competing payment processors was not going convince Apple to actually do it. Instead, Apple cooked up a set of rules for third-party payment processing that would make it more costly to use someone else's payments, piling up a mountain of junk fees and using scare screens and other deceptive warnings to discourage users from making payments through a rival system:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-apple-executive-lied

That's the kind of thing that is apt to make a federal judge angry – and, as noted, angry federal judges can make life very hard for tech monopolists, a lesson Google learned when it destroyed key evidence in its Epic case. But Apple didn't just flout the court order – they lied about it to cover it up, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is furious. She held that Alex Roman, Apple's Vice-President of Finance, "outright lied under oath," and she has raised the possibility of criminal contempt penalties for Apple:

https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/05/01/pacer_epic_vs_apple_injunction_judgement.pdf

The judge further wrote:

This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction. Effective immediately Apple will no longer impede developers’ ability to communicate with users nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases

In other words, any junk fees, any impediments to opening up third party payments, will be switfly and harshly dealt with. As of right now developers can start to build third-party payments into their apps and Apple cannot block them. It's the end of the app tax, a source of about $100b/year for Apple:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/01/apple_epic_lies_possible_crime/

The world is on fire and everything is terrible, but we are also living through the most consequential season in the history of the war on corporate tech power. Google has been convicted three times of being a monopolist and is almost certainly going to have to sell off Chrome, most of its ad-tech stack, and possibly Android. Meta just put up a pathetic showing in an equally serious antitrust case that could see it forced to sell off Instagram and Whatsapp:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/11/it-is-better-to-buy/#than-to-compete

Countries around the world have passed big, sweeping, muscular antitrust laws specifically aimed at smashing corporate tech power, like the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act:

https://www.eff.org/pages/adoption-dsadma-notre-analyse

Most importantly, all of this is happening from the bottom up. There is no dark money campaign to fuck up the tech companies. The politicians and enforcers who are taking on Big Tech are being shoved from behind by billions of everyday people who are furious and refuse to take it any longer:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever-2/#oligarchism

I am deeply grateful for the public servants who have championed this cause, but I also know that these people are the effect of our movement, not the cause. When Kier Starmer fires Britain's brilliant and effective top competition enforcer and replaces him with the former head of Amazon UK, that does nothing to tamp down the political outrage that Britons feel towards America's tech giants:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

All over the world, countries that passed IP laws to protect US tech interests in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets are grappling with the end of free trade with America. This represents a generational opportunity to pass laws that enable local technologists to jailbreak US tech exports and liberate their people from the extractive practices of Big Tech forever:

https://archive.is/CiBIz

There is nothing harder to stop than an idea whose time has come to pass.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

Image: Alex Popovkin, Bahia, Brazil from Brazil (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annelid_worm,_Atlantic_forest,_northern_littoral_of_Bahia,_Brazil_%2816107326533%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

--

Hubertl (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2015-03-04_Elstar_%28apple%29_starting_putrefying_IMG_9761_bis_9772.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[whatsupspaceman]

we could have mobile games like cool math duck life and papas pizzeria and bloonz tower defense and old masterpieces like original angry birds and jet pack joyride and small online games like webkinz home before dark and polar bear plunge and flash games like holeio and snake and we could have barbie dress up and horse riding and we could have them all without thousands of shitty 2 minute ads and microtransactions and unskippable popups and imbedded app store links and we could have new games new incredible story based adventures, puzzles, well designed mini platformers, we have an entire universe of unexplored medium right here in the palm of your hand! we could have REAL games! real wonderful games not misleading not clickbait we could have everything in the whole wide world and we could have them them on the phone! WE COULD HAVE THEM ON THE PHONE !!!!!!!!!!! DOES IT NOT MAKE YOU SICK???? DOES IT NOT SHATTER YOUR HEART !!!!

[math-memes]

[boxmakesart]

Random Luigi doodle because I’ve awakened a newfound obsession with the Super Mario Bros series omggggg

[feminist-space]

You can go to Settings --> Apps --> Photos --> (scroll down to) Enhanced Visual Search --> toggle to off

"Apple last year deployed a mechanism for identifying landmarks and places of interest in images stored in the Photos application on its customers iOS and macOS devices and enabled it by default, seemingly without explicit consent.

Apple customers have only just begun to notice.

The feature, known as Enhanced Visual Search, was called out last week by software developer Jeff Johnson, who expressed concern in two write-ups about Apple's failure to explain the technology, which is believed to have arrived with iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1 on October 28, 2024."

[godbirdart]

Reminder for all Patreon users:

New subscriptions made through the iOS app will include an additional 30% fee starting November 4

Creators can choose to either increase their prices for the iOS app or lose 30% more of their income on top of their existing Patreon fees which can range from 5% - 12%:

Creators will be automatically switched to Subscription Billing starting November 2024. Creators can postpone the change until November 2025 through the creator Settings > Billing

Additional Sources & Reading:

Patreon News: iOS in-app purchases FAQ

Patreon Support: Migrating to Subscription Billing FAQ

Patreon Support: How iOS in-app Purchases Work for Fans

Patreon Support: How in-app Purchases Work on Patreon

Patreon Support: Form to Submit Feedback regarding Apple iOS Changes [link sourced from this Patreon News article]

[april]

man i hate apple i feel like 99.9% of the misunderstanding around community labels could be solved by just having the default setting for mature-labelled content be "blur" instead of "hide" but the fucking app store policy on mature UGC is literally:

If your app includes user-generated content from a web-based service, it may display incidental mature “NSFW” content, provided that the content is hidden by default and only displayed when the user turns it on via your website.

and i'm certain they know, they know that the majority of people don't change settings for things. but they're apple and it's their app store, and the number of people using iOS is too high to ignore, and the only browser (currently) available on iOS is quite frankly the worst one still in common usage, so your options are:

shoot yourself in the foot financially by not having an iOS app (after having already shot yourself in the other foot by starting a social network in the first place)

comply with apple's decree and make your entire platform behave the way they want it to

sucks man.

[videogamesskies]

I'm so happy and proud to release this icons package. As a life long fan of Zelda games, I really wanted to create something both nice and usefull.

So now, you too can customise your phone and show your appreciation of the amazing video game series "The Legend of Zelda".

Available at my Etsy and Gumroad stores.

[m-kyunie]

HELLO ZAKKURA NATION HOW ARE WE 🫵⚔️🫶🏼

[octocon]

Octocon is LIVE on iOS!

I'm pleased to announce that Octocon is now available on the App Store!! The app can be downloaded by the general public using the link below.

In parallel with the iOS release, we've also released our largest app update yet for all platforms: v1.3, codenamed "Ammonite"! A detailed changelog will be posted in our Discord community shortly.

[scliffe]

Really adore Ciel’s expression here because one half of him looks horribly angry and pissed while the other half is just in so much pain.

[littlealienproducts]

Cozy Farming | Cute Aesthetic iOS App Icons, Kawaii Wallpapers and Widgets for iPhone & Android by SophiesJournal

[vexinglyvague]

For all of five seconds I considered getting Threads, then I remembered why I left Facebook about a decade ago:

Why on earth would a Twitter-clone need my health data, financial info, and other sensitive data? And all of it linked to me? What a scumbag app