Being in the EU does smooth a lot of things in terms of compliance, payment processing and whatnot, but I also like that their data retention and privacy policies are pretty clearly spelled out. I need to know something, there's a good chance it's explained outright somewhere and I don't need to read between the EULA lines and wonder what it means.

I do hit limits in terms of capabilities sometimes, and I'm sure other providers' services offer better results for some things. But the businesses ran on top of those more capable models feel too much like a scam at this point and I'd rather not depend on them for anything I actually need.

What the article doesn't point out is that this is deeply ingrained not just among companies but among customers, too, and it's one of the many culture shocks I've seen my colleagues who move between US and EU markets experience.

If a European customer (adjusting for geographical variation, Europe is pretty big and diverse) runs into some weird issue and they call tech support, there's a very good chance that you've already lost them. It doesn't matter if tech support was super helpful, remedied things right away, and the customer support experience was top notch. The perception is that if they had tech support to un-break it, someone not only cut corners, but didn't even cut them very well, and now they wasted their time, too.

This isn't "just a cultural thing", it's ingrained because of how customers themselves do business, too (which makes it especially difficult to deal with in a B2B setting). The whole chain of commercial relations and norms is structured in such a way that depending on a "move fast and break things" platform is a very, very bad idea.

This is one of the most frequent things I had to explain in review meetings, and it went both ways:

- People who moved from US to EU markets didn't understand why customers had nothing but good words to say about customer support and then didn't renew contracts citing quality issues

- People who moved from EU to US markets going nuts over product release timelines getting aggressively slashed not so much because the feature sheet was too thin but because they thought there was no way to get those features tested enough

KDE solved 99% of the theming requirements by just allowing color customisation and shipping with a default theme that doesn't suck too badly.

Pre-emptively, I'm not saying anything below applies in your case :-).

A mismatch in the threshold of "they should already both know and have internalized" is where much of the friction in high-stress organisations comes from.

I see a lot of people expecting, as the parent post put it, "a clear set of steps that can be burned down [to get to a good result]", but entirely oblivious to the fact that the people they expect it from:

1. Don't have the organisational authority to organise it -- they can do "their part" but they can't tell people on whose work they depend what to do.

2. Don't have access to the same task-specific information as the person who expects it of them, and don't know who to ask because teams are heavily compartmentalised and/or hierarchical.

3. Don't have access to the same kind of organisational information as the person who expects it of them.

Much like responsibility, deflecting blame comes from above. In my experience, what the parent poster says is true: people who are bad at what they do and try to make it someone else's problem is probably the most common source of stress. But it is also my experience that the middle leadership layers of companies where this is a chronic problem is almost entirely populated by managers who try to make everything other people's problem, and whose teams end up having to deflect everything by proxy whether they want it or not.

I think this is part of the nuance that's lacking in the parent post. It's very hard for someone to work significantly above their organisation's level.

> user names and passwords for logging in to various accounts belonging to Schutt have been published at least four times since 2023 in logs from stealer malware.

So this isn't from website dumps with plaintext passwords.

If your password is in the dumps, too, like this person's passwords, then yeah, you might want to look into it.

Touch some grass, mate, Apple isn't worth your energy. No company their size is, whether on this side of the Atlantic or the other.

What you've pointed out has no bearing whatsoever on what's being discussed here. This isn't about some stretched out definition of "payment system" that applies to those services that happen to have both iOS and Android client applications. It's strictly about what works in applications available on Apple's App Store. For many of them your point 4 doesn't even apply because they don't have an Android variant in the first place.

Let me know when you'd like to go back to discussing the actual issue from the linked article. Bye!

But even if it did, Apple's ToS clearly distinguish between the App Store and the licensed application, and between interactions in the App Store and interactions from within the application. You may not want to make the same distinction in order to be right about some imaginary system that you're thinking about, but this is about the actual App Store, not whatever iMcCostco-Amazon marketplace you've dreamed up.

This one's no better, either, as Costco's terms for its wholesale suppliers aren't anywhere close to Apple's, even though the agreement is structured more or less similarly -- but sure, let's entertain it: Costco's terms for its suppliers aren't public, but at least the ones that are on public record (via the SEC: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1940372/000149315222... ) make no restrictions on the choice of payment processors for digital products, which is what Apple got fined for.

There is a restriction on promotional material enclosed with the product (as in it needs prior written approval from Costco, not as in it's completely banned) and an explicit mention that it applies to digital products as well. But there is no requirement that digital products sold by Costco as merchant of sale for the supplier enable purchases only via Costco.

From the Amazon website? No. From the products they're selling? Yes, absolutely, and lots of them do, I get one of those business cards with "Find us on Amazon/Ebay/Shopify/whatever" in the box with almost every purchase.

Same with apps. I obviously don't expect them to link to items from other stores from their App Store description pages. But from their application? Yes, I totally expect that.

That's how marketplaces everywhere work, including IRL. Go to any farmer's market and most sellers will give you a business card with their website or phone number so you can also order from them directly, or from their Amazon/Shopify/whatever page.

Edit: not to mention that this is 2025, the distinction between "within the app" and "via your website" is pretty meaningless in a bunch of cases.