Epic Games (tweet, MacRumors):
Epic also plans to bring our own mobile games including Fortnite to other mobile stores that give all developers a great deal. And, we will be ending distribution partnerships with mobile stores that serve as rent collectors without competing robustly and serving all developers fairly, even if those stores offer us a special deal for our own games.
[…]
In exciting news, we are announcing that our mobile games will come to AltStore on iOS in the EU, and we expect to announce support for at least two other third-party stores soon.
Jay Peters (Riley Testut, AltStore, Hacker News):
AltStore PAL, a third-party iOS app store that’s available in the EU, is dropping its annual €1.50 (plus tax) subscription after receiving a “MegaGrant” from Fortnite developer Epic Games. AltStore originally charged the subscription to help cover Apple’s Core Technology Fee (CTF), which is a fee third-party app marketplaces have to pay for each annual app install.
Tim Hardwick:
As for Epic, it has submitted the Epic Games Store to Apple for notarization under Apple’s alternative app marketplace policy in the European Union. The Epic Games Store will include Fortnite, which means iPhone users in the EU will be able to install and play the title without having to use a cloud gaming service. An iPad version of Fortnite is expected to follow this year.
Previously:
AltStore App Marketplaces Epic Games European Union Fortnite iOS iOS 17
Hartley Charlton (Hacker News):
Apple today announced that developers will soon be able to offer NFC transactions in their own apps for the first time – something that is mostly exclusive to Apple Pay at present.
Starting with iOS 18.1 later this year, developers will be able to offer in-app contactless transactions, separate from Apple Pay and Apple Wallet, using new APIs. This opens up new possibilities for in-store payments, car keys, closed-loop transit, corporate badges, student IDs, home keys, hotel keys, merchant loyalty and rewards cards, and event tickets, as well as government IDs in the future.
[…]
Developers will need to request the NFC and Secure Enclave entitlement, enter into a commercial agreement with Apple, and pay the associated fees.
It’s unclear what the fees and business terms are. I presume it will be like CarPlay where some developers get the entitlement and others never even get a response.
Matt Birchler:
So not only can other apps do this, other apps can take over the “double-press the side button” shortcut on iPhones. This means Google Pay, PayPal, ShopPay, or countless other existing, popular wallets could be your wallet and accessed in a moment to pay in stores (after they’ve added support for this, of course). Wonderful!
I’m sure Apple was going to do this anyway and this has nothing to do with regulatory pressures, right? 😉
Mark Gurman:
While Apple pushed back on opening up NFC for what it has called privacy and security reasons, let’s be honest: a huge driving factor has been $ as Apple takes a % of Apple Pay transactions. But, fear not! Apple will charge third-parties for the feature.
Previously:
Update (2024-09-23): Joel Breckinridge Bassett:
Open NFC is the payments version of DMA ‘open’ app store government regulation. The EU Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA) wants to forbid Apple from monetizing its Apple Pay IP and infrastructure from all developers who want to use the embedded secure element for NFC payments. iOS 17.4 Apple Host Card Emulation was Apple’s answer to EU demands that has now been formalized with a few more conditions.
Open NFC, HCE, is not about being open and never was. It is limited to EMV protocol payments and benefits EMV consortium member payment networks as they can use proprietary without paying for the privilege. It is also limited to EMV based payment app developers who have the necessary resources to deploy the necessary security protocols for cloud processing.
Joel Breckinridge Bassett:
Apple announced a new iOS 18.1 API for iPhone: the NFC & SE Platform, a new framework for in-app NFC transactions using iPhone XS and later Secure Element.
[…]
It sounds like fun, but it could be a headache for users when it comes to Wallet app Express Mode. Yes folks, despite all the excitement the potential downside is that we might have to deal with NFC-clash. Let’s take a look at in-App supported transactions broken out by Wallet app Express Mode and non-Express Mode categories[…]
[…]
There we have it, all in-app NFC transactions require double-click authorization, they don’t get Express Mode which remains a Wallet app exclusive.
Antitrust Entitlements iOS iOS 18 Near-Field Communication (NFC) Secure Enclave
Christian Tietze:
I think I will need to be leaving FastSpring as the sole shop for my apps and ebooks and stuff.
At the very least, I’ll need to set up an alternative as a fallback:
2 days ago I received an email that one of the shop backends was being ‘offline’d and no live transactions will go through.
No prior notice, no information as to why. Also, the reply email is automation@ so I needed to manually get in touch with support.
Still waiting for “risk team” reply after support “escalated” my inquiry.
Thankfully, this hasn’t happened to me, though I’ve recently had trouble logging into their admin interface. FastSpring’s communication used to be excellent, but as previously discussed they seem to have changed.
Rich Siegel:
FastSpring support has gotten really terrible. They had some kind of bug where one of my colleagues couldn’t log in for THREE DAYS. Each exchange cycle with their “support” took 24 hours, with no escalation path. We have no “relationship manager” or other direct point of contact.
Previously:
Update (2024-08-17): Christian Tietze:
Wait, my FastSpring store has been deactivated again?
On top of the other deactivation?
What is going on here?
Christian Tietze:
Tuesday I got the first email. Friday the second, same text.
It’s Saturday, I still haven’t heard from anyone.
DEVONtechnologies:
Unfortunately, we see the same thing happening with Paddle. They used to be excellent but customer support is now a chatbot and dev support also takes a day per exchange cycle …
Václav Slavík:
oh no, they started deploying the chatbot against vendors too something like a year ago. It seems to be on and off and if you complain, they turn it off, but it’s there. And the boilerplate replies usually take 2-3 tries to get past for me…
Update (2024-08-19): Christian Tietze:
Did I mention I haven’t heard anything helpful from FastSpring in 6 days now?
In the past I was pleasantly surprised when support would reply on Saturdays. Now that support is useless, I’m waiting for I-don’t-know when.
Update (2024-08-20): Logging into FastSpring stopped working again. I e-mailed them and got a quick reply, indicating that they needed to change the username on my account. Then it immediately started working again.
Business FastSpring Paddle Payments Web
Ben Sandofsky (Mastodon, MacRumors, tweet, Reddit):
Today, we are launching something unlike any tech product in 2024: a product that uses zero AI and zero computational photography to produce natural, film-like photos. We call it Process Zero. It lives in Halide, and it turns your iPhone into a classic camera.
Process Zero is a new mode in Halide that skips over the standard iPhone image processing system. It produces photos with more detail and allows the photographer greater control over lighting and exposure. This is not a photo filter— it really develops photos at the raw, sensor-data level.
[…]
Because Process Zero does not fuse multiple shots, you are limited by the dynamic range of the sensor.
However, you can get sharper (albeit noisier) photos that don’t have the smooth, glowing, over-processed look.
Previously:
Update (2024-08-17): Ben Sandofsky:
We launched with support for RAW capture, no developing. The results looked awful, but useful for camera nerds.
We tried to fix this in 2020 with a button to auto-develop afterwards. It was an extra step, appealed to camera nerds, and results were hit or miss.
We threw that out and started over. This is just… our processing. An alternative to Apple’s.
See also: Hacker News.
Update (2024-09-13): Filipe Espósito:
A Process Zero photo is based on the RAW image captured from the sensor. Halide saves both RAW data and a JPG or HEIC image that can be easily shared with anyone. One downside is that third-party apps can only take RAW images at 12 megapixels on the iPhone, so there’s no way to capture 24 or 48 megapixel Process Zero images.
[…]
Naturally, since Process Zero images don’t take advantage of Night Mode, the pictures will look noisier. Halide suggests that users take pictures with manual controls to reduce the ISO for better results. Also, since Process Zero images don’t have HDR, you need to make sure which object in the scene you want to adjust the exposure accordingly.
See also: Lux.
Colin Devroe:
I want to use Halide’s Process Zero a lot more - perhaps all the time? But it only shoots raw and I’d prefer JPG for most things mostly due to size.
After trying out Process Zero for a while, I don’t think it’s really for me, though I will continue to use it for select shots where it’s really important to have lots of editing options. The two main issues:
Most of the time, I have no preference or prefer the non–Process Zero photo. For my purposes, it’s not worth the storage and trouble of creating multiple versions of each photo (one of them RAW) to see which I prefer. With older iPhones and iOS versions, I liked using Keep Normal Photo so I could easily have both HDR and non-HDR versions of each image, as often one was much better than the other, and the storage penalty wasn’t huge. But Apple has removed that option—and no longer even lets me turn off HDR. Halide does have an option for using Apple Processed without Smartest Image Processing, but this needs to be chosen in the settings; it doesn’t automatically save multiple versions of each photo.
Using Halide alongside the regular Camera app doesn’t seem to play well with iOS multitasking. As soon as I started doing this on hikes, my Gaia GPS tracks started getting holes in them where it would stop recording for a while.
Update (2024-09-25): Niko Kitsakis:
First picture is the mush that is Apple Pro RAW (what a joke). The second picture is RAW with
@halidecamera
Process Zero and Photoshop RAW denoiser (Level 40). Look at the gradient inside the window and generally at the lines in the image.
Previously:
Gaia GPS Halide High Dynamic Range (HDR) iOS iOS 17 iOS App iOS Multitasking Photography Raw Image Format
