@pixelscience the difference is a game business can be successful without deploying on Xbox, Steam, or PlayStation - and many are.

That’s not the case with iPhone. There are major industries, including many direct competitors to Apple (such as Spotify) which have to agree to whatever terms Apple comes up with. That’s why Apple is being held to a higher standard than game consoles.

Ultimately it’s up to government to make these decisions.

@nick_rogers there aren’t that many people - relative to the national population - who live and work in inner city Melbourne though. Also wouldn’t trams be a better option?

I think I have a typical Aussie commute - 20km each way, average speed by car in peak hour is almost exactly 60km/h.

I have an urban e-bike and ride it regularly - but mostly not on my commute. It just takes too long - and sadly it’s also unsafe (council is working on that). I mostly commute in my Ute.

@helge I’ve used all three for decades. In my opinion RC is worse than GC, and ARC is better than GC.

In theory RC and ARC can be the same, but in practice code isn’t to optimise performance. Real code is optimised for reliability and readability. In the real world, ARC stands head and shoulders above the other two.

@helge @mattiem @finestructure the biggest win for ARC over GC and RC wasn’t memory usage. It was better at that too - but the huge win was performance.

Back when I compared all three, I found ARC was faster - a lot faster - than RC. GC was fast too but it just kicked the can down the road - once your task was finished GC would run the CPU would be saturated for a time.

These were simple/common tasks - like reading a large document. Or converting between JSON and the internal memory structure.

@helge @mattiem @finestructure Swift doesn’t use RC though, it uses ARC.

Obj-C upgraded from an RC language to one where you could use RC or ARC or GC at and it was no contest - ARC works so much better that vigorous discussions on memory management were short lived, everyone quickly recognised ARC is faster, uses less memory, and has no drawbacks.

The Swift version of ARC is an order of magnitude better again - because the language and core libraries were carefully architected around ARC.

@pixelscience @daringfireball because Apple has been giving away APIs for free for decades and withholding that under the DMA would be blatantly anticompetitive. I have no problem with charging for APIs. Lots APIs are commercially priced. But exclusively charging developers who don’t use an Apple service? That’s not OK.

The price for APIs should be the same for all developers no matter what store.