“When Apple refused to fundamentally alter the way it does business to appease Epic, Epic resorted to sudden, unilateral action that blatantly breached its contracts with Apple, and simultaneously filed this lawsuit, which seeks to justify its deliberate breaches after the fact,” Schiller said.
The tech giant goes on to compare Epic’s recent attempt to bypass the App Store by allowing Fortnite players to buy in-game currency to shoplifting. “If developers can avoid the digital checkout, it is the same as if a customer leaves an Apple retail store without paying for shoplifted product: Apple does not get paid.”
Apple delisted Fortnite on August 13th shortly after Epic started offering discounts on the title’s in-game currency if players bypassed the App Store. Shortly afterward, Epic responded by launching a lawsuit against Apple in which it claimed the App Store violates antitrust law. It also found time to parody Apple’s famous 1984 Macintosh ad. Later that same day, Google removed Fortnitefrom the Play Store. Epic responded with a lawsuit there as well.
The legal battle Apple and Epic find themselves locked in is a risky one for both companies. Apple faces the potential of drawing even more scrutiny to itself. Meanwhile, Epic could see Fortnite permanently barred from the App Store and without a way to update the Unreal Engine, which many third-party developers depend on for their iOS games. The court will hear Epic’s request for a restraining order on Monday.
“In the end, it’s likely mostly one or multiple of the giant multi-million and billion and trillion corporations will win big,” Ismail said. “The question is how much ‘collateral’ damage is done to the small developers on the way.”
After baiting Apple and Google into removing Fortnite from their mobile storefronts this month, Epic separately sued bothcompanies, accusing them of anticompetitive practices. The case against Apple is particularly prominent, as it has a history of blocking third-party payment systems from operating on iOS and enforcing austere revenue-sharing rules on the App Store — unless you’re Amazon, that is.
Epic Games has filed legal papers in response to Apple, read more here: https://t.co/c4sgvxQUvb
When it revealed the lawsuit against Apple, Epic dropped a 48-second video on YouTube parodying the company’s iconic 1984 ad and calling for all Fortnite players to “join the fight” against the “App Store Monopoly.”
Apple has since threatened to remove Epic’s access to developer tools on iOS and Mac, which would cut off updates and support for the Unreal Engine, a platform used by tens of thousands of developers worldwide. Ismail called this the “first blow” of collateral damage against independent creators.
“Apple and Google have an iron grasp on almost everything related to the mobile app ecosystem, including distribution and sales,” Ismail said. “I am glad Epic is making the topic easier to discuss, and that they’re putting some ridiculous PR pressure on the mobile platforms to adjust. I’m also just amused because I’ve never seen a lawsuit triggered as if it were a Trap Card in Yu-Gi-Oh, with an honest-to-god in-game trailer. It truly is a new era of legal spectacle.”
Epic Games
Vlambeer won the Apple Design Award in 2013 for Ridiculous Fishing, a stunning and addictive game built specifically for mobile devices. Ismail has experience working with every major gaming platform, from PC to console to mobile, and he’s previously spoken out about the unsustainable nature of a standard industry practice: the 30 percent revenue share. This is a significant portion of Epic’s lawsuit against Apple, which calls the fee “exorbitant.”
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has long been a loud proponent of lowering the 30 percent fee collected by Valve, Microsoft, Sony, Apple and Google for participation in their digital storefronts. In fact, when his company launched the Epic Games Store in December 2018, its main marketing line was that it charged developers just 12 percent.
This was a direct attack on Steam, Valve’s multibillion-dollar powerhouse that had gone unchallenged in the PC gaming space for more than a decade. Sweeney made it clear and issued an ultimatum to Valve, tweeting, “If Steam committed to a permanent 88% revenue share for all developers and publishers without major strings attached, Epic would hastily organize a retreat from exclusives (while honoring our partner commitments) and consider putting our own games on Steam.”
In late July, Apple CEO Tim Cook spent a few hours defending his company against claims from the House Judiciary Committee that it operates the App Store as a monopoly. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai was there, too, but he had other questions to answer, mainly about Google’s ad business.
Representatives questioned Cook about the time Eddie Cue bragged to Steve Jobs about blocking Random House from establishing its own bookselling apps on the App Store amid the launch of iBookstore, and about the special treatment Amazon was able to secure earlier this year. Apple routinelyblocks developers from establishing their own payment systems or otherwise circumventing the App Store’s built-in buy buttons, but in April the Prime Video iOS app quietly rolled out payments directly through Amazon, allowing one of the most valuable companies in the world to sidestep Apple’s fees entirely. Apple says this is all acceptable under a rarely used clause for premium subscription video entertainment providers, but even the most avid industry observers remain unconvinced.
Cook spent over five hours arguing under oath that the App Store treats every developer exactly the same, and a week later, Apple was forced to justify its decision to block some gaming apps from operating on iOS. Microsoft’s xCloud game streaming service was one of those apps, and the company released a statement that read: “Apple stands alone as the only general purpose platform to deny consumers from cloud gaming and game subscription services like Xbox Game Pass. And it consistently treats gaming apps differently.” On top of the US congressional investigation, the European Union is looking into Apple’s App Store practices on behalf of Spotify.
In summary, Apple is vulnerable. Well, as vulnerable as a company valued at $2 trillion can be. Epic’s lawsuits were planned well in advance, with Sweeney commenting on Apple and Google’s monopolies ahead of the tech antitrust hearing, and rolling out in-game anti-Apple Fortnite events afterward.
“If small developers see any benefit, it’ll be a lower revenue share paid to another corporation, and it will probably come at the expense of selling your game inside someone else’s app,” Ismail said.
Which brings us to the heart of Epic’s lawsuits. They aren’t about Fortnite. They aren’t about Apple or Google’s revenue-sharing models. All of this is about getting the Epic Games Store on mobile operating systems.
Mobile is the fastest-growing segment in gaming, estimated to be worth $77.2 billion in 2020, according to Newzoo. Right now, Apple has made a habit of blocking third-party payment systems from operating on iOS, and even on Android, Google makes it difficult to sell in-game goods outside of the Play Store. Epic ran into this issue when it briefly tried to run Fortnite outside of Google’s mobile ecosystem, a feat that it didn’t even attempt on iOS. A mobile version of the Epic Games Store represents a massive source of potential revenue for Sweeney’s company, and it doesn’t want to share those sales with Apple or Google.
In a conversation with Engadget, Franklin was eager to address some of these questions. And even when he declined to provide specifics, he laid out an ambitious — and in some ways surprising — vision for the BlackBerry of the near future.
The original plan, according to Franklin, was to build the “the most secure phone out there.” That’s the sort of angle that opens doors, but doesn’t usually translate to mass-market success. Over time, however, the team’s priorities came to include productivity, as evidenced by the number of times the word plastered on the OnwardMobility website. For now, the specifics are still shrouded in secrecy; Franklin wouldn’t elaborate on the new BlackBerry’s features apart from noting that the phone will pack “tons of unique experiences” and “security propositions.” Still, that newfound focus on getting things done helped widen the project’s scope considerably.
While OnwardMobility is eager to push new hardware at business and government customers, Franklin has committed to building this new phone with normal consumers in mind. “The only way to be successful with government and enterprise is if consumers want to use it too,” he said. “If your company makes you use this phone and you don’t like it, that’s not where we want to be.”
OnwardMobility is targeting a launch in the first half of 2021.
OnwardMobility
But here’s the thing: OnwardMobility’s definition of a phone consumers want to use seems totally different from TCL’s, or any of BlackBerry’s earlier licensing partners. Franklin describes the device the company plans to ship in the first half of 2021 as a consumer-first “global flagship” (his words, not mine) with a “world-class camera” and support for both sub-6 and mmWave 5G networks. And then there’s the keyboard. OnwardMobility confirmed in its press release that the new BlackBerry would indeed have a physical keyboard, but Franklin — a fan of the classic Bold 9900 — wouldn’t elaborate much on the phone’s design.
Of course, that might be because the design isn’t set in stone. According to Franklin, the team is collaborating closely with its partner FIH Mobile and has strong opinions about the device it wants to make, but still craves feedback. “We want to hear from the users,” he said.
With all that said, there is at least one aspect of BlackBerry production that Franklin seems especially adamant about. Security remains the biggest priority for OnwardMobility, and a big part of fully securing a smartphone in 2020 is securing its supply chain. That’s an exceptionally tough feat when you consider the lion’s share of the world’s hardware production happens within Chinese borders. FIH Mobile, Onward’s manufacturing partner, knows that all too well. While its parent company Foxconn is headquartered in Taiwan, most of its smartphone production happens across multiple factories in Shenzhen.
Not so for the BlackBerry: Franklin insists that the company’s forthcoming phone will be manufactured completely outside of mainland China. If that pans out, the likeliest candidates would be FIH’s facilities in Vietnam or India; the company has been boosting production capacity there as trade friction between the US and China continues to build. Producing a phone outside of China is one thing, but Franklin seems to be chasing an even more ambitious goal. “We want to be the most American-made phone out there,” he said. “The specifics of that and how we’re enabling that are to come.”
“Facebook employees are laying out contingency plans and walking through postelection scenarios that include attempts by Mr. Trump or his campaign to use the platform to delegitimize the results,” The New York Times reports. The company is also gaming out what it would do if Trump uses Facebook to “wrongly claim on the site that he won another four-year term,” or if he “tries to invalidate the results by declaring that the Postal Service lost mail-in ballots or that other groups meddled with the vote.”
Trump has made repeated false claims about mail-in ballots and election fraud in recent months. Experts have warned the comments could trigger a “nightmare scenario” on election day as it’s likely that results won’t be official for at least several days after polls close.
Facebook executives have previously hinted that they may be preparing for such scenarios. The company said last week that it was “actively speaking with election officials about the potential of misinformation around election results as an emerging threat.” The post didn’t mention the president, but noted that “a prolonged ballot process has the potential to be exploited in order to sow distrust in the election outcome.” Facebook also said it would rely on its voting information center to share authoritative information about election results.
All of the Circle Guitar’s mechanical parts are housed in a single 3D-printed unit, according to Guitar World. Plectrums slotted into the rotating motor can play at up to 250bpm (beats per minute). There are 128 slots for picks, and you can program your own strumming pattern that can sync to a DAW. As such, the Circle Guitar can theoretically strum the strings 32,000 times a minute. Even someone who can play “Flight of the Bumblebee” at 1,600bpm can’t measure up to that for any sustained length of time.
Given the way the motor works, you might imagine the guitar would only be good for chords that use all six strings. That’s not quite the case. There’s a hexaphonic pickup and each string has its own output. The body of the guitar has six switches and buttons that can mute individual strings. That’s a clever idea, which gives the Circle Guitar more utility than it would have otherwise.
Best of all, the Circle Guitar sounds cool. Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien was impressed when he got to try it. There’s no word on if or when you’ll be able to buy one, but you can join a mailing list if you’re interested.
Trump’s executive order cited national security concerns arising from a report by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). “We’ve made it clear that we strongly disagree with the conclusions of CFIUS and we’re certainly disappointed in the outcome that we saw there,” Pappas said. “We still haven’t been presented with any evidence to back up those claims and assertions.”
TikTok has fought against claims that it could be forced to hand over data to the Chinese government, saying it has an American CEO and that it doesn’t take orders from China. Meanwhile, Microsoft confirmed that it had begun discussions with TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to acquire the US operations, and Oracle is reportedly in similar talks as well.
Whether it’s through an acquisition by a major American company or dogged persistence on the part of TikTok’s US employees, it appears the app won’t be leaving the country anytime soon. Until the 90-day deadline is up though, TikTok’s future in America is foggy at best.
Best Buy can help you get the most bang for your buck with a couple of Echo device bundles. Both the Echo Show and the Echo Studio are on sale for $180 and $170, respectively, and both include a free Echo Show 5 and a free Philips Hue smart light bulb. You’re getting over $100 worth of freebies in both bundles — that’s not only a great bargain, but it’ll help anyone jump start their quest to build a smart home.
The iPad mini is the best small tablet you can get and now you can grab it for $50 less on Amazon. The 64GB WiFi model down to $350 and the 256GB WiFi model down to $500. If the limitations of a traditional e-reader frustrate you, the iPad mini is your best alliterative as it’s roughly the same size as most e-readers but it can do a lot more thanks to iOS. The latest model even supports input from the first-generation Apple Pencil, too.
Robot vacuums are handy cleaning machines and a couple of iRobot’s high-end Roombas remain on sale at Wellbots. The Roomba i7+ is down to $699 and the retailer also has the Roomba S9+ for $999. These are some of the most feature-packed Roombas you can get — both of them include a cleaning base, too, which is a garbage can of sorts that the vacuum automatically empties its bin into after a job. That means you don’t have to clean the bin yourself after every job, which adds another level of convenience to these devices. The Roomba i7+ is powerful enough for most people, but the S9+ is designed to clean up pet hair even more efficiently.
TCL’s 8-series Roku smart TVs have returned to their lowest prices ever: the 65-inch model is $1,000 and the 75-inch model is $1,500 right now at Best Buy. The last time they hit this low was at the end of July, and during that time, the 75-inch sale price didn’t last long. These are some of TCL’s latest smart TVs, featuring quantom-dot LED and micro LED technology. They also support features like Dolby Vision and HDR 10 and you can control them with your voice using Roku’s own interface, or Amazon’s Alexa or the Google Assistant.
Nintendo’s Share the Fun eShop sale is going on through August 30 and it cuts 50 percent off the prices of some Switch titles. Of note is Luigi’s Mansion 3 on sale for $42, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games on sale for $40, Diablo III: Eternal Collection for $30 and many more. Most of the games included in this sale are great to play with friends and family — you may not be inviting people over right now, but you can still have fun with your whole household.
Both Best Buy and Amazon have one model of Razer’s Blade gaming laptop for $200 off, bringing it to $1,600. While it’s still an expensive machine, the Blade packs a punch at every level. Not only is it a gaming laptop with one of our favorite, relatively minimalist designs, but this model also has a 10th-gen Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage and NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2060 graphics chip. If you’re not constrained by a budget, it’s a sold laptop to invest in before heading back to school if you want one device for both work and play.
Sam’s Club members who are also AT&T customers can snag a good deal on the new Samsung Galaxy Note 20 or Note 20 Ultra: buy one of Samsung’s newest smartphones and get a $200 Sam’s Club e-gift card. Members are also able to get up to $1,000 worth of bill credits when they trade on an eligible device. It’s a good deal if you fit into both categories, but keep in mind that the offer is only available online (you can’t get it at a physical Sam’s Club or AT&T location) and the $200 gift card promotion ends on September 30. We gave the Note 20 Ultra a score of 86 for its large, awesome display, top-notch performance and thoughtful new S Pen features.
Iron Man VR is getting a meaty update today. Camouflaj is launching a free patch (1.06) that adds new game modes and weapons. It also improves things like load times.Once you’ve completed the game, you’ll be able to re-experience the story in New Gam…
The system’s “catalytic artificial micro-muscle” is made with a nickel-titanium (NiTi) shape-memory alloy (SMA), a wire that shrinks and expands with temperature changes. That wire is coated with platinum, and when the platinum interacts with RoBeetle’s methanol fuel, a combustion reaction generates heat. The temperature changes cause a tiny vent to slide back and forth, regulating the fuel flow and causing RoBeetle to propel forward.
The researchers say RoBeetle could allow microbots to go where humans cannot. But as IEEE Spectrum points out, there are still a few challenges to overcome. RoBeetle can only move forward, and once it starts walking, it will keep walking until it runs out of fuel. Still, while other bio-inspired, untethered robots are powered by chemical fuel (Octobot), solar panels (RoboBee) or batteries, RoBeetle is a novel approach.
If a Nintendo Switch can run the Crysis remaster, you might assume more powerful consoles and modern PCs should have no trouble in handing the notoriously resource-hungry game. Maybe not so much if you’re hoping to play Crysis Remastered with all the…
Iron Man VR is getting a meaty update today. Camouflaj is launching a free patch (1.06) that adds new game modes and weapons. It also improves things like load times.Once you’ve completed the game, you’ll be able to re-experience the story in New Gam…
If a Nintendo Switch can run the Crysis remaster, you might assume more powerful consoles and modern PCs should have no trouble in handing the notoriously resource-hungry game. Maybe not so much if you’re hoping to play Crysis Remastered with all the…