Archive for December 4, 2020

Friday, December 4, 2020

Family Sharing for Subscriptions and IAPs

Apple:

You can now enable Family Sharing for auto-renewable subscriptions and non-consumable in-app purchases, allowing users to share their purchases with up to five family members. Family Sharing provides a streamlined, convenient user experience and can help you attract subscribers, encourage paid subscriptions, increase user engagement, and improve retention.

Juli Clover:

In the App Store settings under “Subscriptions,” there’s a “Share New Subscriptions” setting that appears to be enabled automatically, allowing subscription apps to be shared among family members. The new option is available on the current release version of iOS, iOS 14.2.

Previously:

BlueMail Antitrust Case Against Apple Dismissed

Hartley Charlton:

Blix Inc., developer of the email app BlueMail, then filed a lawsuit accusing Apple of manipulating search results in its iOS and macOS App Stores to suppress third-party competition and push consumers towards Apple’s own apps. Blix also alleged that Apple copied patented messaging technology for its “Sign In With Apple” feature before removing BlueMail from the App Store.

Judge Leonard P. Stark of the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware dismissed the claims, concluding Blix had failed to offer direct or indirect evidence of Apple’s monopoly power or anticompetitive conduct in violation of the Sherman Act.

[…]

Judge Stark said Blix’s anticompetitive-conduct claims failed because the company itself demonstrated that the App Store isn’t essential to BlueMail’s success.

Previously:

Update (2021-07-14): Juli Clover:

Apple asked the judge to toss out the case, and the motion was granted, with the case being dismissed a second time on Friday. In a statement, Apple said that Blix had “alleged false conspiracy theories and anti-competitive claims,” and that the judge’s decision confirms that Apple has “consistently acted legally.”

Beman Dawes, RIP

14ned:

I am sorry to report to r/cpp that Beman Dawes passed away yesterday.

Beman had an unusually large impact on C++ over his long and very productive life. My personal opinion of his most monumental achievement was getting Filesystem into standard C++, which was probably the most tortuous, lengthy, and difficult library to have ever been standardised (to date), and that followed a preceding tortuous, lengthy and difficult Boost peer review involving multiple redesigns of the proposed library. Beman was on WG21 from nearly the beginning, served as the Library Working Group chair for some time, and was one of the original cofounders of the Boost C++ Libraries. He also had a long history of continuous contributions to open source, starting from when many on r/cpp were still children.

Dave Abrahams:

Beman Dawes was my friend, inspiration, and collaborator. He was a living demonstration that collegial respect and kindness are fundamental to getting great results. His idea for Boost.org blossomed into a unique community, inventing the art of library design.

iOS Apps on Mac Require System Integrity Protection

Longhorn:

If you disable SIP on an Apple Silicon Mac, you lose support for the Apple DRM. (FairPlay)

Your iOS apps will not run on the system and some media playback might be affected/become unavailable.

Apple keeps telling us that all the new security features don’t actually restrict what you can do with your Mac because you can turn them off. But here’s a case where you really do lose functionality—rather than just security—because you can’t run software that requires SIP and software that forbids it at the same time.

Previously: