If you break any concept/law down far enough, it becomes kinda meaningless.
Terms of use, or laws don't have to be written in perfect logical consistency. The important thing is intent.
The intent is not to block things that resemble running an application remotely. The intent here is controlling everything that could possibly be sold/distributed as something resembling an application or game.
I see these kinds of comments a lot, where someone describes a rule or law, break it down to it's core components and declare it's illogical.
Generally laws are not enforced exactly by how they are written, but by their original intent. This is also why legal precedent and testing laws in court is so important.
> If you break any concept/law down far enough, it becomes kinda meaningless.
I call bullshit, I think it's mostly just bad laws that become ridiculous when 'broken down'. If you want to convince me otherwise, demonstrate your claim using laws against murder (unambiguously good laws.)
Hmm I'd like to see your "laws against murder" that cover every possibly corner case of homicide being acceptable or unacceptable without relying on intent of the law to come into consideration regardless of circumstance. It would be infinitely long.
There is no unambiguously good law because of the simple fact nothing is unambiguously good. Given billions of people and many years some ambiguous scenario is going to come up even around the most "obviously good/bad" things.
I think you must have misunderstood. The idea was to make laws against murder sound ridiculous by breaking them down, not make yourself sound ridiculous.
Of course the law isn't ridiculous at face value, it's extending it to corner cases without looking at intent that can be. That's the point, the same thing is true of any law. It's impossible to cover all corner cases, at some point you need intent when you try to take it too far from what it was written to cover.
I understand what you're trying to say but "core components" and "corner cases" are part of the same concept. You can't say "I have concept <x> which is made of core components <y> and corner cases <z>" in one breath and then in the next say "<x> is unambiguous without looking at <z>" and unless you have a concept that depends on nothing else for it's construction this applies recursively as well.
E.g. "murder is always illegal" is not true and a bad law/take on the concept. Expanding the law to include "murder is always illegal except when... <other laws>" is only unambiguous if <other laws> are unambiguous. I don't think I need to take it further to explain justifiable homicide isn't unambiguously black and white or always possible to rule on without looking at intent of the various laws and what happened.
Bringing that back to the original thing this is true of any concept or law, including reviewing some remote apps and not others based on what they are for not that they are remote. I'm not saying I agree the way Apple regulates these is good I'm just saying I agree the fact some remote apps are regulated and others aren't isn't proof alone the regulation is contradictory.
> I understand what you're trying to say but "core components" and "corner cases" are part of the same concept.
Sure! And if you look at the overall concept, it does not become meaningless. To get to meaninglessness requires you separate the two.
"Unambiguous" is a much much higher bar that we don't need to worry about. Something can be 5% ambiguous but still very meaningful.
> Bringing that back to the original thing this is true of any concept or law, including reviewing some remote apps and not others based on what they are for not that they are remote. I'm not saying I agree the way Apple regulates these is good I'm just saying I agree the fact some remote apps are regulated and others aren't isn't proof alone the regulation is contradictory.
It's not proof by itself, but if you can show that there's no good reason for the distinction then it's a strong mark against Apple.
If I was in incredible pain and wanted to end my own life but was not capable on my own I might ask a close friend to help me with that. If that friend had enough empathy to help me fulfil my hypothetical wish then they would be a murderer, but a kind and helpful one.
edit: maybe we want to define murder as killing someone who does not want to be killed. I would ask what you have to say about the "trolley problem".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
Yes, I sometimes see a logical sounding but naive argument that laws should be completely free of grey area and understandable by laypersons because it would be unfair to require people to conform their conduct to laws they cannot fully understand or predict. A little experience with law shows that when the “problem space” you are trying to regulate is the real world including human intentions there is no way to make things logically complete and airtight and free of unfair edge cases so in practice law is somewhat a social construct where you have to have the human enforcers interpreting fairly.
> Generally laws are not enforced exactly by how they are written
I think that’s pretty much untrue. Laws are enforced exactly as written. Where the judges come in is the interpretation of what was written. If that’s in line with the intent then that’s great, but I very much doubt that’s always the case.
Of course. There are so many dangerous websites out there. Scams, low quality content and user experience, websites that won't let you cancel easily. Have you ever tried to see what a terrible place the Internet is on Android? That's why I pay a premium to Apple, so I don't have to worry about using subpar websites. Apple quality control ensures only good websites are allowed to be accessible on Apple ® Internet Pro Max ®. The 100$ per year registration fee and the 30% cut to Apple keeps the low quality out and the Apple review makes sure there are no malware and scams. Do you remember what a horror show it was back in the days of the Open Web? That's why I recommend iPhones and Macs to my family, so I don't have to worry about them getting scammed or reading bad content on the internet. /s
Replace websites with apps and open web with PCs and you get the usual defence many people on HN make about Apple's practices in App Store.
The distinction is that the app developer is also selling access to specific computer software running on the developer’s infrastructure, to be run in a way that appears to function just like on-device code.
I don’t fully agree with Apple’s decision but I do understand it and recognise that it’s an awkward intersection between selling software and access to software that’s running elsewhere.
