Linked List: August 28, 2020

Friday, 28 August 2020

Apple Terminates Epic Games’ Developer Account 

The last approved version of Fortnite still runs, but along with other games from Epic, it’s no longer available from the App Store, even if you previously downloaded it. This means you won’t be able to restore Fortnite on a new or factory-reset iPhone.

Statement from Apple:

We are disappointed that we have had to terminate the Epic Games account on the App Store. We have worked with the team at Epic Games for many years on their launches and releases. The court recommended that Epic comply with the App Store guidelines while their case moves forward, guidelines they’ve followed for the past decade until they created this situation. Epic has refused. Instead they repeatedly submit Fortnite updates designed to violate the guidelines of the App Store. This is not fair to all other developers on the App Store and is putting customers in the middle of their fight. We hope that we can work together again in the future, but unfortunately that is not possible today.

Tim Sweeney:

Apple’s statement isn’t forthright. They chose to terminate Epic’s account; they didn’t *have* to.

Apple suggests we spammed the App Store review process. That’s not so. Epic submitted three Fortnite builds: two bug-fix updates, and the Season 4 update with this note.

Neither company “had to” do any of this, so that’s a futile line of argument. Epic didn’t have to sneak their rule-breaking payment processing in via a trojan horse in the last-approved Fortnite version, and didn’t have to refuse to take their rule-breaking payment processing out in the subsequent builds they submitted. Apple didn’t have to respond, but it would have been pretty weird — to say the least — if they just let Epic get away with this. One can certainly argue that Apple’s rules are wrong, but it’s not wrong for Apple to enforce its own rules. Nothing Apple has done in this saga has been surprising, with the possible exception of attempting to revoke the developer license for Epic’s subsidiary that makes Unreal Engine.

The “instead they repeatedly submit Fortnite updates designed to violate the guidelines” line in Apple’s statement is interesting, though. I don’t read it as an accusation of “spamming”, as Sweeney claims. Epic submitted three builds, none of which removed their in-app purchase circumvention, so they knew Apple was never going to approve them. They were just wasting Apple’s time. But I find it interesting that Apple even mentioned it, or phrased it that way. It indicates that Epic has gotten under their skin to some degree. Of course Apple is annoyed by Epic’s antics; but you’d think Apple wouldn’t let that show. Apple shouldn’t think about Epic at all.

CNBC: Trump Admin Put Kibosh on Walmart Taking Majority Stake in TikTok 

Alex Sherman, reporting for CNBC: 

Walmart wanted to be the exclusive e-commerce and payments provider for TikTok and have access to user data to enhance those capabilities, one of the people said. But the people said the U.S. government wanted the lead buyer of TikTok to be a technology company because that would better fit with its national-security rationale for forcing Chinese owner ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. operations.

Walmart confirmed its partnership with Microsoft Thursday, releasing a statement stating its interest in TikTok’s e-commerce and advertising capabilities.

Even if we put aside the issue of whether the U.S. government should be dictating that a foreign company must be sold to an American company — a big issue to put aside that ultimately shouldn’t be put aside, but hear me out here — why do they also get to choose which industry the American company is in? I don’t personally think of Walmart as a tech company but who the hell is Jared Kushner or Larry Kudlow or Steve Mnuchin — or whichever Trump numbnuts it is making these calls — to make that decision?

This is just bizarre banana republic stuff. This is why Wall Street is putting money behind Biden, too — the stock market is riding high, yes, but investors want stability and predictability. The Trump administration’s role in this TikTok sale — not the ban of the service, which is a legitimate national security concern, but this role as broker of the deal — is crazy.

Susan Glasser: ‘The Malign Fantasy of Donald Trump’s Convention’ 

Susan Glasser, writing for The New Yorker:

Trump attacked Biden by name forty-one times in his prepared remarks, some kind of record in a Convention speech. Biden is a “destroyer of American greatness” itself, Trump said, and he supports “the most extreme set of proposals ever put forward by a major-party nominee.” He is a pawn of China and the radical left, “a Trojan horse for socialism,” a representative of a “failed political class,” and a loser on the wrong side of history. He and his party will “demolish the suburbs.” They will “confiscate your guns.” Biden, in short, will end America as you know it.

The problem, of course, is that America as we know it is currently in the midst of a mess not of Biden’s making but of Trump’s. Suffice it to say that, by the time Trump’s speech was over and the red, white, and blue fireworks spelling out “2020” had been set off over the National Mall, late Thursday night, more than three thousand seven hundred Americans had died of the coronavirus since the start of the Convention — more than perished on 9/11 — and a hundred and eighty thousand Americans total had succumbed to the disease, a disease that Trump repeatedly denied was even a threat. His botched handling of the pandemic was the very reason that his Convention was taking place on the White House lawn in the first place.

This photo captures the national moment.

Biden Should Go to Kenosha 

George Packer, writing for The Atlantic:

Nothing will harm a campaign like the wishful thinking, fearful hesitation, or sheer complacency that fails to address what voters can plainly see. Kenosha gives Biden a chance to help himself and the country. Ordinarily it’s the incumbent president’s job to show up at the scene of a national tragedy and give a unifying speech. But Trump is temperamentally incapable of doing so and, in fact, has a political interest in America’s open wounds and burning cities.

Biden, then, should go immediately to Wisconsin, the crucial state that Hillary Clinton infamously ignored. He should meet the Blake family and give them his support and comfort. He should also meet Kenoshans like the small-business owners quoted in the Times piece, who doubt that Democrats care about the wreckage of their dreams. Then, on the burned-out streets, without a script, from the heart, Biden should speak to the city and the country. He should speak for justice and for safety, for reform and against riots, for the crying need to bring the country together. If he says these things half as well as Julia Jackson did, we might not have to live with four more years of Trump.

Packer’s column is good, but his headline — “This Is How Biden Loses” — is fatalistic. Biden should go to Kenosha, and further escalate his shadow pre-presidency. Fill the moral and emotional void left by Trump’s failures. The political jujitsu is obvious: hammer home the point that we are in Trump’s America now. He’s been president four years. Stand before the burned buildings and say this isn’t what it will be like under a Biden presidency, this is what it is like, right here in front of us today, under Trump’s. “This violence is tearing our businesses, our homes, and our hearts apart, and it must stop. Trump is the president, and he obviously can’t stop it. I will. We didn’t have violence in our streets under President Obama and we won’t under President Biden.” The speech writes itself.