shadowfiend

... Yeah, that's a replacement for your girlfriend kind of like watching TV is a replacement for eating dinner...

The gp's interpretation of that tweet is such a completely incorrect reading as to make one think it's likely disingenuous.

The actual reason here, implied but not stated outright in that one, is that Discord being a public platform, having only numbers to discriminate between users makes it extra-trivial to impersonate someone else. Obviously you can still do some of this with unique usernames (you see slight misspellings, adding harder-to-see characters like periods, etc, as strategies), but these are more complex to execute on at scale and easier to block once and reduce the impact, vs being able to use ~arbitrarily many post-username numbers.

The point above wasn’t about value to shareholders but rather about being able to pay the people doing the actual work.

Apple and Google and any app store provider have the ideal goal of zero friction for real, valuable apps and infinite friction for bad, scam apps. They can never hit that ideal, but when you're getting rage from both ends it's likely that you are in a place on the continuum that is far below ideal—you make it a huge pain for real, valuable apps and too easy for bad, scam apps. This appears to be where the Apple store is, at least, and it's an unfortunate place to be. They may be doing their best, but it sounds like their best has some pretty significant room to improve.

While I don’t claim to know the finer points of the law, I believe the judge was pretty crystal clear that Apple was 100% within their powers to kill the developer account that Epic used to do this.

Epic didn't publicly criticize Apple or testify against them in court to get into this situation, they willfully and deliberately broke the legal developer agreement that they signed to get press coverage (they could have filed suit on the anti-steering rules regardless).

Not only did they do this, they then filed suit to say that Apple shouldn't have been allowed to suspend their account—and lost (though arguably won the broader war since anti-steering is currently dead).

There are a ton of things Apple is doing wrong around developer stuff and anti-steering rules and all of it, but I dunno, I feel pretty good about them saying to a specific developer, “actually, you've shown yourself to be willing to ignore the legal agreements you sign, so we're not going to be doing business with you any longer“. Epic's stunt should cost them, if they then want to talk about how they've martyred themselves for developers everywhere. Good work, but a martyr who comes back to life isn't really a martyr, right?