Issue 2322 - Thursday 1 May 2025

The News

Apple’s reign of terror over its own App Store is over

Apple’s tight grip on its App Store has been crowbarred open by a savage US court result (The Verge). In a judgement to Fortnite creator Epic Games’ lawsuit against Apple over its restrictions for app payments on Apple devices, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has ruled that Apple can’t stop developers from linking to purchases outside of an app, take a cut of any payment out-of-app or otherwise interfere with developers’ choice of buttons or decision to leave the app. What’s more, the judge blasted Apple for ignoring a previous injunction and referred Apple for criminal prosecution (WSJ, gift link)! Epic has celebrated the outcome, saying it’ll put Fortnite back on the App Store imminently after it was kicked off for using its own in-game payment system (The Verge). Apple is appealing but, geez, this is a pretty monumental decision.

Tech has not been an election issue (and maybe that’s a good thing?)

It’s kinda hard to write about the absence of something but I really think it’s worth acknowledging that this election campaign has featured almost zero tech policy. As InnovationAus’ Joseph Brookes points out today we’ve got big policy questions about privacy, AI, automated decision-making, quantum computing, data infrastructure, tech regulation that all need to be answered (InnovationAus, $). We also had a little bit of NBN funding talk as the election started but otherwise the parties are not talking about it (The Guardian Australia) despite the fact that we’re facing problems like whether Australians are going to actually get the NBN speed increases that they’re being promised (ITNews). The counterpoint to this? I was on the Burning Platforms podcast this week where we talked about how Australia’s tech policy almost always suffers when it becomes part of a national, political contest (Podbean). So maybe we should be grateful that they’re not talking about it.

Apps want devices to do age verification but research shows why it might not matter

We’re seeing some intra-big tech fights as Meta, Spotify and the makers of Tinder, Hinge and Bumble are lobbying the US government to make Apple and Google do age verification instead of them (Bloomberg, archived). As I’ve mentioned before, this makes way more sense to me but I can’t see Google or Apple doing it unless they’re forced to. This all might be moot — or at least less important — if the results of some new research about how people respond to age verification bears out (Ars Technica). Researchers found that after Louisiana passed an age verification law, users started searching for non-compliant websites and VPNs and stopped searching for websites doing age checks (Osf.io). Take the results with a grain of salt, but the story of the internet has always been people taking the path of least resistance to get what they want.

Leftovers

Oh, Also

The tech reason why a student was rescued from Mount Fuji twice

Whom amongst us hasn’t torn apart our house or gone to other ridiculous lengths to find our phones? That’s why I cannot judge the university student who was rescued from Mount Fuji twice in a week because he went to retrieve his device that he had lost on his first ascent to nearly 10,000 feet above sea level (The Guardian). There is one part about this reporting that is disappointing: it is not yet known whether he recovered his phone.

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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