Linked List: May 2025

Thursday, 8 May 2025

Yours Truly on ‘Primary Technology’ ★

Co-hosts Stephen Robles and Jason Aten were kind enough to have me on their podcast earlier today, and the show’s already up:

Special guest John Gruber joins us to break down Eddy Cue’s statements on AI replacing the iPhone in 10 years, using AI search in Safari, Apple’s continued fight for App Store control, and what we’ll hear about Siri and Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2025.

Available in Overcast, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Or watch on YouTube. Fun show.

Patrick Collison Interviews Former Apple Designer Jony Ive at Stripe Sessions ★

I’m about halfway through and already feel the need to link to this. Good questions and thoughtful answers. Just delightful.

How to Catch a North Korean Fake Worker ★

Iain Thomson, for The Register:

According to Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike’s senior veep in the counter adversary division, North Korean infiltrators are bagging roles worldwide throughout the year. Thousands are said to have infiltrated the Fortune 500.

They’re masking IPs, exporting laptop farms to America so they can connect into those machines and appear to be working from the USA, and they are using AI — but there’s a question during job interviews that never fails to catch them out and forces them to drop out of the recruitment process.

“My favorite interview question, because we’ve interviewed quite a few of these folks, is something to the effect of ‘How fat is Kim Jong Un?’ They terminate the call instantly, because it’s not worth it to say something negative about that,” he told a panel session at the RSA Conference in San Francisco Monday.

You could do the same thing with MAGA derps too. Just ask them how fat Trump is. (Via Charles Arthur.)

The Trump Administration Signal Scandal, Somehow, Gets Worse ★

Micah Lee, in a spectacularly detailed post:

On Thursday, 404 Media reported that in the Reuters photo showing former National Security Advisor and war criminal Mike Waltz checking his Signal messages under the table, he was actually using an obscure modified Signal app called TM SGNL, and not the real and actually secure Signal app.

On Friday, I wrote an analysis of everything I could find out about TM SGNL using OSINT, including the fact that it’s nearly impossible to install without a device enrolled in an MDM service that’s tied to an Apple Business Manager or a Google Enterprise account.

On Saturday, after discovering that TeleMessage published the source code for the TM SGNL apps for Android and iPhone themselves, I re-published them on GitHub with the goal of making them easier to research. (It looks like the iOS source code is actually just unmodified Signal, so maybe they actually only published their Android code.)

On Saturday night, an anonymous source told me they hacked TeleMessage.

On Sunday, I, along with Joseph Cox, published an article about the hack to 404 Media (and to my blog).

On Monday, NBC News reported that TeleMessage suspended its service after a second hacker breached TeleMessage and “downloaded a large cache of files.”

Today, Senator Ron Wyden published a letter, which cites the 404 Media article and my analysis of TM SGNL, to Attorney General Pam Bondi, requesting that the Justice Department investigate the “serious threat to U.S. national security posed by TeleMessage, a federal contractor that sold dangerously insecure communications software to the White House and other federal agencies.”

National security leaders using this app — which effectively just removes all of Signal’s actual security features by backing up all messages as plain text — is so stupid it’s surprising, even from these idiots Trump has surrounded himself with. I mean think about how stupid it is that Mike Waltz was using this app while in front of press photographers at a Cabinet meeting.

Lee goes deep, including an analysis of TM SGNL’s open source Android source code, to show that it’s designed to transmit backups of messages in plain text to publicly-facing servers. And it turns out those servers had easily-hackable flaws.

Wednesday, 7 May 2025

Eddy Cue, on the Stand in U.S. v. Google Trial, Says Apple Is Eying a Move to AI in Safari ★

Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is “actively looking at” revamping the Safari web browser on its devices to focus on AI-powered search engines, a seismic shift for the industry hastened by the potential end of a longtime partnership with Google.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, made the disclosure Wednesday during his testimony in the US Justice Department’s lawsuit against Alphabet Inc. The heart of the dispute is the two companies’ estimated $20 billion-a-year deal that makes Google the default offering for queries in Apple’s browser. The case could force the tech giants to unwind the pact, upending how the iPhone and other devices have long operated.

Beyond that upheaval, AI is already making gains with consumers. Cue noted that searches on Safari dipped for the first time last month, which he attributed to people using AI. Cue said he believes that AI search providers, including OpenAI, Perplexity AI Inc. and Anthropic PBC, will eventually replace standard search engines like Alphabet’s Google. He said he believes Apple will bring those options to Safari in the future.

“We will add them to the list — they probably won’t be the default,” he said, indicating that they still need to improve. Cue specifically said the company has had some discussions with Perplexity. “Prior to AI, my feeling around this was, none of the others were valid choices,” Cue said. “I think today there is much greater potential because there are new entrants attacking the problem in a different way.”

If they can pay, Apple will listen. And I don’t think it’s bullshit, at all, that traditional web search is actually going into decline now because of AI. Honestly at this point it would be weird if it weren’t.

But. Let’s say Apple would prefer for the current arrangement between Apple and Google to continue as is. But it’s under threat as a remedy in Google’s monopoly case. Is this not the perfect testimony? Traditional web search is in decline, usage-wise — and Apple is considering deals with multiple upstarts. I think it’s all true. But I also think it helps make the case that the current deal between Apple and Google should not be disallowed.

I don’t think there’s any bullshit here. I think we’re at a highly competitive moment between browsers and chatbots and between old-school search and new-school AI. And I think Eddy Cue is right in the middle of it.

Also, a really interesting nugget that, according to Cue, searches in Safari dropped last month for the first time ever.

Aftermath ★

Aftermath:

Welcome to Aftermath, a worker-owned, reader-supported news site covering video games, the internet, and the cultures that surround them.

You might remember most of us from Kotaku, where we broke news, covered events, and brought you hard-hitting investigations. You might also have seen us at Motherboard by Vice, The Verge and The Washington Post’s games vertical Launcher. We got back together to start this site not just so we could all blog together again, but to try something new for ourselves and for games journalism.

These days it’s tough for journalism, especially about games. The past few years have seen mass layoffs and site closures, with remaining writers being asked to do more and more with less and less. The ad-supported model is crumbling, social media is a mess, and the businessmen and private equity firms buying up news outlets don’t care about workers, readers, and quality writing, they only care about profits. The five of us saw our sites closed, ourselves and our colleagues laid off, and our workplaces turned hostile in management’s pursuit of growth at all costs. [...]

As workers and owners, we’re beholden to no one but ourselves, and to you, our readers. When you subscribe, you’ll get access to writing that pursues the truth and casts a critical eye on gaming and the internet, that doesn’t need to placate capital or kowtow to PR. You’ll be supporting the kind of journalism our past experience has shown us you like best: honest and irreverent, written for people rather than SEO. You’ll get a site that prioritizes the reader experience, with no invasive popups or ads that burn up your device.

They’re a smart crew, so of course, they’re not launching this on Substack. (They’re using a platform called Lede, upon which the excellent Defector has built itself.) How can you not love a site with this ode to a classic bit of kit: “Bring Back Those Long-Ass Game Show Mics”. An elegant weapon, from a more civilized age.

Polygon Gutted by Large-Scale Layoffs After Sale to Sweatshop Aggregator Valnet ★

Kyle Orland, reporting for Ars Technica last week:

Vox Media has sold video game specialist website Polygon to Internet brand aggregator Valnet, the publisher of content-churning sites including Game Rant, OpenCritic, Android Police, and Comic Book Resources. The move comes alongside significant layoffs for veteran journalists at the 13-year-old outlet, including co-founder and editor-in-chief Chris Plante and Senior Writer Michael McWhertor. [...]

Polygon was founded in 2012 when Vox Media spent significant money to poach top journalists from popular gaming blogs like Kotaku, Joystiq, and The Escapist. After initially publishing as the Gaming section of Vox.com for a few months, the Polygon domain launched alongside a series of flashy videos hyping up the staff’s lofty goals for video game journalism. In the years since, Polygon has become a respected source for news and views on the gaming and entertainment industries — one that Ars Technica has cited frequently during my tenure as senior gaming editor. [...]

According to publications like The Wrap and Aftermath, numerous Valnet writers have claimed that they receive low pay for long articles, but Valnet insists that working conditions are good. It even sued The Wrap in federal court, saying that Valnet “relies on its reputation as a supporter of high-quality journalism and of talented writers and editors to staff its ever-growing business and need for engaging and well-written content.”

Just brutal. I’m not huge into games, but Polygon has been one of my go-to sources for game-related news for years. If I wanted to catch up on something like, say, Nintendo’s Switch 2 announcements, I knew I could go to Polygon and they’d have the coverage nailed. Polygon was everything you could want: good writing, good design, no hype, trustworthy coverage and analysis.

There’s very little good news in media these days. The only talented people I see launching new things are doing it on Substack, and I think that’s going to end poorly for all of them.

Tuesday, 6 May 2025

Amazon, Finally, Now Has a ‘Get Book’ Button in Its iOS Kindle App ★

Andrew Liszewski, The Verge:

Contrary to prior limitations, there is now a prominent orange “Get book” button on Kindle app’s book listings. [...]

Before today’s updates, buying books wasn’t a feature you’d find in the Kindle mobile app following app store rule changes Apple implemented in 2011 that required developers to remove links or buttons leading to alternate ways to make purchases. You could search for books that offered samples for download, add them to a shopping list, and read titles you already own, but you couldn’t actually buy titles through the Kindle or Amazon app, or even see their prices.

I’d love to just crack a joke here about Amazon, maybe, possibly, finally getting a chance to gain a bit of market share in the e-book market. I’d love to just crack that joke and move on.

But really, this whole situation with e-books has been the best argument against Apple’s App Store policies for at least the last 15 years. Physical printed books are typically sold under a wholesale model. The publishers sells the book to a bookseller for a wholesale price (say, perhaps, half the suggested retail price) and the bookseller is then free to charge whatever actual retail price they want to customers. But e-books are sold under the agency model: the publisher sets the retail price, and the bookseller keeps 30 percent. But Apple’s App Store policies therefore make it impossible for a third-party bookseller to sell e-books and make even a penny of profit. Let’s say there’s an e-book that the publisher decides will sell to customers for $10. When Amazon sells the Kindle edition of that book, the publisher gets $7, and Amazon keeps $3. But if the Kindle iOS app allowed purchases of books through IAP, Apple would take its 30 percent first. Apple would get $3, Amazon would still owe the publisher $7, and there’d be nothing left over — not a cent — for Amazon itself. Effectively they’d lose a bit of money on each sale, and it would be impossible to make even a penny of profit.

You can’t even fix this by raising prices. Double the retail price to $20 and then Apple would take $6, and the publisher would be owed $14. Still not a cent left for Amazon. The App Store model is just fundamentally incompatible with the agency model.

What Apple should have done, 15 years ago, is look at this situation and decide “Well, we have to allow something else. Kindle users should be able to buy books on iOS devices from the Kindle app.” And the solution is incredibly obvious: let apps send users out of the app to the web to make purchases, without Apple taking a cent. That’s what’s happening now, because of Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers’s injunction, but it should have been something Apple permitted 15 years ago because it’s so obviously fair and just. I’ve argued consistently that it’s fine for Apple to insist that in-app purchases for digital content must use Apple’s payment system. But I’ve also argued consistently that Apple should allow from-app purchases to freely go to the web. Tap a button or link, leave the app and go to the web, and make the purchases there. Then go back to the app and the app can sync up what you just purchased. Done. Simple.

Apple’s obstinance on this has created nothing but friction, confusion, and hassle for users for 15 years. It makes no sense for anyone. Until last week, not only were third-party apps forbidden from including buttons/links to send users to the web to buy books, they were forbidden from even informing users that they needed to go to the web to buy books. Apple’s rules included a rule that forbade apps from explaining the rules to the users.

I can see, at some level, where executives at Apple are like, “Fuck Amazon. There’s no way for us to even make an Apple Books app for Kindles, let alone sell our own e-books on their devices, so they can go fuck themselves. Why should we let them sell e-books on our devices?” That’s all true. There are no third-party apps on Kindles. There are third-party apps on iPhones and iPads. But at some point Apple should have just considered their own users. If their users are using the Kindle app looking to buy Kindle e-books on iOS devices, Apple should have just let it happen on the web — and used that as motivation to make Apple Books better so that maybe more users would prefer it to the Kindle ecosystem. What’s the word? Oh yeah ... competed.

Florida Republican Congresswoman Kat Cammack Introduces ‘App Store Freedom Act’ to Mandate Third-Party App Stores on iOS and Android ★

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge:

Representative Kat Cammack (R-FL) introduced a bill Tuesday that would require “large app store operators” like Apple to let users install third-party app stores and set them as their default. The bill, called the App Store Freedom Act, aims to “promote competition and protect consumers and developers in the mobile app marketplace,” according to a press release on Tuesday. [...]

It would also require Apple and Google to offer developers “equal access to interfaces, features, and development tools without cost or discrimination,” as well as allow users to remove or hide pre-installed apps. Violations of the bill would result in penalties from the Federal Trade Commission, along with an additional civil penalty of up to $1 million for each violation.

This is a stunt from the Epic/Spotify-backed Coalition for App Fairness that we’ll probably never hear about again.

Tim Sweeney Talks to Peter Kafka, Still Thinks Fortnite Is Coming Back to iOS This Week ★

About 16 minutes into the podcast (the whole thing is a great succinct interview):

Kafka: You said Fortnite is going to come back to iOS. You guys were kicked off the platform in 2020 for violating Apple’s rules. There’s nothing in the judge’s ruling that says Apple has to reinstate Fortnite on iOS. Have you talked to Apple? How do you imagine Fortnite will come back to iOS?

Sweeney: Epic has a valid [Apple] developer account in good standing. Our subsidiary Epic Games Sweden opened up an account in order to distribute Fortnite in the European Union. Our dealings with Apple on that account have been managed by their developer relations team, who have been cordial.

Kafka: Do you feel confident that I will be able to play Fortnite on my iPhone later this week?

Sweeney: I believe so. I would be very surprised — well, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if we had a bug that took a day or two more to fix — but I would be very surprised if Apple decided to brave the geopolitical storm of blocking a major app from iOS.

We’ve told Apple what we’re doing.

But Apple has, for the last five years, already blocked a major game — Fortnite — from iOS. If Apple were going to allow Fortnite back into the App Store they could have done so at any point in the last four years. And there’s nothing, not a word, in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’s decision last week that says Apple needs to reinstate Epic Games. I think Apple just stays the course and Fortnite remains persona non grata as far as the App Store is concerned.

But I could be wrong. Sweeney tweeted over the weekend “Not Monday or Tuesday. Beyond that, we’re working as hard as possible and aren’t certain what day it will be ready.”

Me, I’m not holding my breath.

Monday, 5 May 2025

Listen Later ★

My thanks to Listen Later for sponsoring last week at DF. Listen Later is a super simple, super useful service that turns articles into podcast episodes. When you sign up, you get a custom email address to send articles to; every article you forward to your Listen Later address is transformed into very human-like narration, and gets delivered to your private podcast feed. You can subscribe to your private Listen Later podcast feed in any podcast app.

In addition to the email gateway, there’s a Shortcut for sending articles from Safari (on Mac or iOS), a web extension for Chrome, and a simple web interface for submitting new articles. It’s very simple and the narrated versions sound great.

Sign up for free and start listening today. New users get $2 in credits to try it out — no commitment. And if you like it, you simply prepay for credits as you go. There’s no subscription — you simply pay for what you use. I wish more services had a pay-as-you-go model like Listen Later’s.

Sunday, 4 May 2025

Koji Kobura Remakes the GoldenEye N64 ‘Pause Music’ ★

Just shoot this straight into my veins. So good.

(Via Saul Sutherland.)

Trump Has No Idea What the Declaration of Independence Means ★

Trump, showing off to ABC News’s Terry Moran the historical copy of the Declaration of Independence now hanging in the Oval Office:

Trump: Of course, you have the Declaration of Independence.

Moran: What does it mean to you?

Trump: Well, it means exactly what it says. It’s a declaration. It’s a declaration of unity and love and respect. And it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.

Watch the clip. A transcript doesn’t do justice to just how clear it is he has no idea what it means. I keep mentioning that Democrats should hammer, every day, the argument that Trump is way too old and now suffering from dementia. It’s just good politics. But I think it’s actually true, too. Mark my words, by the time he gets toward the end of this second term they’re going to have to somehow try to keep him away from microphones. You can’t get out of the fourth grade without being able to describe what the Declaration of Independence means.

Trump, Asked if He Has to ‘Uphold the Constitution’, Says, ‘I Don’t Know’ ★

NBC News:

When Welker tried to point out what the Fifth Amendment said, Trump suggested that such a process would slow him down too much.

“I don’t know. It seems — it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials,” he said. “We have thousands of people that are — some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth.”

“I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it,” he added.

“But even given those numbers that you’re talking about, don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?” Welker asked.

“I don’t know,” Trump replied. “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”

The oath of office, which Trump has now taken twice, is “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

I’ll repeat what I wrote a few weeks ago when the Chinese government correctly mocked Trump’s tariffs as “a joke in the history of world economics”: Democrats and all other Trump opponents should repeatedly call into question Trump’s mental fitness for office. Don’t (just) argue that he’s trying to subvert the Constitution as a WWE-style authoritarian, but argue (also) that he clearly doesn’t even remember the oath of office. He’s in early dementia. Trump’s father was suffering from severe dementia when he was Trump’s age. Throw Biden under the bus: remind people that we just saw what happens when a mentally enfeebled 80-year-old^* serves as President, and that under Trump it’s far worse. Biden was sleepy but steady; Trump is agitated and erratic. Only some dementia sufferers act lost and confused — others act out in anger and belligerence. Trump is in the latter group. He doesn’t remember the oath of office.

* Keep calling him “80”; make his sycophants correct you that he’s “only” turning 79 in June.

Friday, 2 May 2025

Apple Updates U.S. App Review Guidelines Following Injunction ★

Apple, in an email to developers yesterday (as reported by MacRumors):

3.1.1: Apps on the United States storefront are not prohibited from including buttons, external links, or other calls to action when allowing users to browse NFT collections owned by others.

3.1.1(a): On the United States storefront, there is no prohibition on an app including buttons, external links, or other calls to action, and no entitlement is required to do so.

3.1.3: The prohibition on encouraging users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase does not apply on the United States storefront.

3.1.3(a): The External Link Account entitlement is not required for apps on the United States storefront to include buttons, external links, or other calls to action.

This does not mean apps can now use alternative payment processing in-app. It doesn’t even mean apps are no longer required to offer Apple’s IAP in-app for purchases and subscriptions. All it means is that apps (in the US for now, but Apple really ought to make this worldwide, but I suspect Tim Cook wants to fight this on appeal in federal court) are free to inform users about offers available on the web, and to link to those offers on the web. Those links must open outside the app, in the user’s default web browser.

In-app: must use IAP. No alternative payments in-app. No webviews in-app for purchases.
Link to web, in default web browser, for anything else. ~~But the same offerings — but not at the same prices — must be available in-app too.~~

In other words, plainly and obviously, in-app purchases must compete with purchase offerings on the web. Which is exactly how the policy should have been for at least the last 10 years. It’s been incredibly frustrating and baffling that Tim Cook has refused to see that this is the obvious and correct path for everyone involved, including Apple itself.

Jason Snell on Apple’s Q2 FY 2025 and Frustrating Analyst Call ★

Jason Snell, with some excellent analysis (in addition to his usual visualizations of Apple’s numbers):

Another way Apple can reduce the impact of tariffs is by changing which global factories it uses to build products destined for the U.S. market. “For the June quarter, we do expect the majority of iPhones sold in the U.S. will have India as their country of origin,” Cook said, “and Vietnam to be the country of origin for almost all iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and AirPods products also sold in the U.S.” He said that if you’re outside of the U.S., you’re most likely to be buying products made in China.

Cook also commented briefly on Apple’s philosophy in dealing with the issues of trade wars between various countries: “Obviously, we’re very engaged on the tariff discussions,” he said. “We believe in engagement and will continue to engage.” Elizabeth Warren take note, I guess.

Apple also put a number on how much it will be affected by tariffs during its next fiscal quarter: $900 million. Yes, that’s nearly a billion dollars, but when you consider that Apple just generated $95.4 billion in revenue and that it’s expecting to grow from the $85.8 billion it generated during last year’s third quarter, a $0.9 billion step back doesn’t seem like a massive amount. The company also said it would probably lose a couple of points of gross margin as part of the deal.

And, regarding the analyst call (of which Snell also posted his usual very helpful transcript):

Credit to that brave analyst, Richard Kramer, who didn’t bother asking a ninth question about tariffs, but instead asked Cook head-on about the fact that Apple had failed to live up to its promise of shipping a more personalized Siri as a part of Apple Intelligence.

Cook’s answer was a canned response emphasizing the features Apple did ship, and “We need more time to complete our work on these features so they meet our high-quality bar. We are making progress, and we look forward to getting these features into customers’ hands.” Which is true, but not exactly informative.

Kramer, who is going to get an analyst gold star for this, also asked Cook about the various court cases that might really impact Apple’s business. Regarding yesterday’s court ruling in the Epic case, Cook said, “We strongly disagree with [it].... We’ve complied with the court’s order, and we’re going to appeal.” He declined to discuss Google’s case and the potential loss of search-engine referral revenue altogether.

But, and I think this is important, Cook did not wave off the suggestion that these were serious issues. “We’re monitoring these closely, but as you point out, there’s risk associated with them, and the outcome is unclear.”

It would be kind of ridiculous if Cook did wave off the suggestion that these were significant issues. A federal judge has referred the company to federal prosecutors for criminal contempt and she flatly stated in her ruling that VP of finance Alex Roman perjured himself multiple times.

These analyst calls are largely a waste of time. The questions are obtuse and the answers are obfuscating. But it was frustrating yesterday that the first eight questions were all about Trump’s tariffs. Cook said what he had to say about them early in the call. Only Richard Kramer had the backbone to ask any of the other interesting questions facing Apple — and he was the analyst who asked both those questions. But they stuck his questions at the very end of the call. (I think because Apple vets the questions, Apple orders them?) If you want to listen, Kramer’s first question (re: Siri/AI delays) starts at 48:30 on Apple’s recording of the call, and his second (re: legal cases) starts at 51:00.

It’s like all the analysts but Kramer had their fingers in their ears and eyes closed and were chanting “Everything’s normal for Apple, everything’s normal for Apple, everything’s normal for Apple...” No one even asked about the material impact of Apple being required to immediately change the App Store guidelines (in the US) to allow unfettered link-outs to the default web browser to make purchases and sign up for subscriptions. You’d think that would be a question.

Thursday, 1 May 2025

Apple Lost But That Doesn’t Mean Epic Won Anything ★

Jay Peters, The Verge, under the headline “Epic Says Fortnite Is Coming Back to iOS in the US”:

Following a court order that blocks Apple from taking a commission on purchases made outside the App Store, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says on X that the company plans to bring Fortnite back to iOS in the US “next week.”

The app hasn’t been available on iOS in the US since August 2020, when Apple kicked it off the App Store for implementing Epic’s own in-app payment system in violation of Apple’s rules. Since then, Apple and Epic have been embroiled in an ongoing legal battle, including a ruling more in Apple’s favor in 2021 and today’s ruling that is a major victory for Epic.

I could be wrong, but my read is that while the ruling was clearly a significant and reputationally damaging loss for Apple, that doesn’t make it a “win” for Epic at all. Just because the case is Epic v. Apple doesn’t mean Epic benefits by Apple’s excoriation. Apple won the original case. It was effectively a sidenote to that original case where Judge Gonzalez Rogers issued an injunction that Apple was required to allow developers to just freely link to alternative payment offerings on the web, outside the app. Basically, that if the App Store is not anticompetitive, apps at least must be able to inform users about competing options for purchases/signups.

Here’s a spitball analogy. Back in the cable TV days, there were many local channels that were available over the air, for free. (That’s still true but almost no one watches TV like this anymore.) Imagine if a monopolist or near-monopolist cable company declared that it would not permit any show on any channel to even mention the fact that the channel was also available free-of-charge over the air. That’s what Apple has been doing with apps in the App Store. If cable was so good, so much better than free over-the-air broadcast TV, it should have been able to thrive even if people were aware of their free over-the-air options. If the App Store is so good, so much better than free over-the-web purchases and signups, it should be able to thrive even if people are aware of their free over-the-web options. Basically, that was Gonzales Rogers’s injunction to Apple. And Apple’s response was basically, “Nah, we’re still not going to allow that, but we’ll pretend to comply by asserting that anyone who starts watching TV channels over-the-air after learning about that via something they saw on cable TV still has to pay us effectively the same rates they’ve been paying to watch those channels via our cable service.” Except instead Apple was asserting that they should collect 27% commissions on over-the-web purchases if the user learned about the option through the native app from the App Store.

None of this, as far as I can see, has anything to do with Epic Games or Fortnite at all, other than that it was Epic who initiated the case. Give them credit for that. But I don’t see how this ruling gets Fortnite back in the App Store. I think Sweeney is just blustering — he wants Fortnite back in the App Store and thinks by just asserting it, he can force Apple’s hand at a moment when they’re wrong-footed by a scathing federal court judgment against them.

Maybe Sweeney knows something I don’t, but I doubt it. I think this is just bluster, PR gamesmanship, and ought to be reported that way, at least for now. If there’s a single sentence in Gonzalez Rogers’s ruling that suggests Apple needs to reinstate Epic Games to the App Store, I missed it.