Share this page!

Francisco Tolmasky Profile picture
Twitter logo
2 Jan, 6 tweets, 2 min read
As I hit "Buy Movie" in the Prime Video app (which only Amazon is allowed to do), it saddens me that the entire AppStore infrastructure is wielded as a comically complicated bargaining chip just so that Apple and Amazon can bully each other into... not charging each other fees.
Years of poor customer experience, putting themselves in danger of anti-trust actions, all of it just for the supremely unambitious goal of being able to hold something over Amazon when they do their boring Apple TV+ on Fire TV negotiations.
It kind of feels like how on Day 1 of the Trump presidency he just tried to get better hotel deals with foreign countries. It was like, really, that was the big plan? That’s how you’re going to abuse the office? At least do something more diabolical! This is just… boring. Tacky.
Imagine an Apple that really put the screws to Amazon by giving every *little upstart* video company fee-less purchases to battle the monopoly of Amazon! Nope. Apple increases some meaningless line item by .1% so they let Amazon go what they want. Yawn.
Or, imagine Apple realizing their awesome power in the AppStore and dumping the Breitbart app. Maybe doing something bold with News.app to combat fake news. That’s something worth facing anti-trust scrutiny for! Nope. Apple prefers to just dump Chinese games.
Also, I still can’t fucking buy comic books in the Comixology app. I guess I have to wait until Apple wants to put Apple Comics+ on the Fire Tablet for that fine-grained negotiation point to become possible.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Francisco Tolmasky

Francisco Tolmasky Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @tolmasky

Francisco Tolmasky Profile picture
7 Nov 20
Don’t be fooled by this drawn out counting process, this *is* what a repudiation of the last 4 years look like. Biden and Harris have done something incredible here, and they absolutely have a mandate. Let me tell you how big of a deal this is. (1/x)
Despite the feeling from polls going into this, this was not our election to win. DJT is only the 4th President in the last *87* years to lose re-election, and only the *11th* ever. And his approval rating was much higher than many of those (44.7% vs. 32.6% Bush and 37.9% Carter)
“But it should have been easy with COVID!”. WRONG. Crises *help* incumbents. When people are scared they rarely choose revolutions. Iraq was a disaster and we re-elected Bush. Kerry got historic numbers and lost to Bush’s more historic numbers.
Read 9 tweets
Francisco Tolmasky Profile picture
11 Sep 20
Forget what developers think of Sign In with Apple, as a *customer*, I’m never going to use it again. I was already skeptical of routing all my email communications through Apple, but the fact that Apple can drop it arguably affects me more than the developer.
In the best case scenario, it's a hassle for me to have to transfer my account in an event like the Epic situation. In the worst case, it seems like I could potentially lose my account? Maybe that doesn't matter for a game, but I certainly won't trust it for stuff that matters.
I'm really not impressed with this “it's such a weird edge case!" excuse either. Only at Apple is it considered an edge case that your service could possibly *also* exist outside the AppStore, and thus someday possibly exist *only* outside the AppStore.
Read 4 tweets
Francisco Tolmasky Profile picture
23 Aug 20
Isn’t it funny how “if you don’t like it, why don’t you leave?!” seems to be most employed when it’s hardest to leave? I feel that if there were a ton of phone options, criticism would probably be reasonably considered, not treated as a sign of disloyalty meriting banishment.
The same is of course true of countries. The most low effort response to any criticism of a country is to suggest you go fuck off to another country if you hate it so much. What? In what universe is “I want to invest *my* time to explain how this could be better” a bad thing?
And of course, if you do leave, then it proves you’re a traitor and thus no one should listen to your criticisms. He was never *really* “with us”. The same people who’ll tell you to leave the US often hate Eduardo Saverin for renouncing his citizenship and going to Singapore.
Read 7 tweets
Francisco Tolmasky Profile picture
23 Jun 20
In *2018* I tweeted about my exhaustion with the “forever transition”: this perpetual state of “bare with us”. We have to use these inbetween states for years, they’re not free. At some point we started treating entire product cycles as betas. (Thread)

And for what — I’m not seeing the unification that matters to me, a unification of UX, a vision of how we should *use* our computers, all I see a unification of component pipelines or perhaps arbitrary refactoring of internal shared components of academic interest.
I keep harping about this but it matters: 10 years after the iPhone the “unification” we’re getting is the one that matters least: the chip architecture. Remind yourself of the excitement from hearing iPhone ran OS X. We’re you excited about potentially sharing instruction sets?
Read 8 tweets
Francisco Tolmasky Profile picture
1 May 20
So the reason I linked the keyboard & software complaints together (aside from the practical reality that the new keyboard got me thinking about this again), is that I think their problems are related: advances in both areas feel slick, refined, and... broken (follow up thread)
The new windowing UI on the iPad is clearly way “cooler” than windows on macOS. They demo great. It *looks* well thought out. But beyond not actually being easy to use, it’s made my existing iPad experience worse since I constantly accidentally initiate some strange window mode.
This is the important trifecta: shiny, missing the mark on its intended purpose, and actually a step backwards for existing usability. The new Magic Keyboard feels very similar in this regard.
Read 11 tweets
Francisco Tolmasky Profile picture
30 Apr 20
The frustrating thing about the iPad is that I constantly feel that I need to be buying into a philosophy. There’s rarely a good *reason* for why I can’t do something other than me “not getting what the iPad is about”. This never happens with the Mac or the *iPhone*.
The limitations of the iPhone feel earned due to the nature of the device. You can get away with a lot because it feels amazing that I can get this much done in this form factor to begin with. But the iPad form factor is basically the same as a laptop, so it deserves no slack.
Especially with keyboard support, every time I want to do something and can’t it just feels completely arbitrary. And now Apple has proven they’ve been crying wolf all along: eventually the iPad always ends up working more and more like a laptop, so why do I have to wait now?
Read 11 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @tolmasky has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @tolmasky!

Read all threads by @tolmasky