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Apple threatens to boot Epic—including Unreal Engine—off Mac and iOS
The new legal battle between game developer Epic and iPhone-maker Apple continues to heat up, as Epic says Apple will be cutting it off from the developer platform for Mac and iOS before the end of this month.
Epic wrote in a court filing (PDF) that Apple said its membership in the Developer Program will be terminated as of August 28. According to Epic, Apple's move threatens not only Fortnite but also every game that uses Unreal Engine: "By August 28, Apple will cut off Epic's access to all development tools necessary to create software for Apple's platforms—including for the Unreal Engine Epic offers to third-party developers, which Apple has never claimed violated any Apple policy," Epic said.
How Apple's battle with Epic Games could affect hundreds of other games beyond Fortnite
If Apple disables Epic's developer account, then the company won't be able to maintain the Unreal Engine for iPhones and other Apple computers. Unreal is a long-standing set of technologies for displaying 3D graphics. Other game-makers license it from Epic so they don't have to re-build the same functions from scratch, and it's used in many popular games, although it's more popular on consoles and PCs than for mobile games.
Also at The Verge and VentureBeat.
Previously:
Fortnite Maker Sues Apple after Removal of Game From App Store
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 20 2020, @01:56PM (1 child)
sudo spctl --master-disable
Is this the "bunch of hoops" you're talking about ?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Thursday August 20 2020, @09:32PM
Every source I've seen on the topic has said you need to do something like this [osxdaily.com], which is more than just a quick command-line option and done. It won't seem like much for people here, sure, but you have to consider how it seems for non-technical users (e.g. most macOS users). They're going to see it as "so I have to figure out how to open a terminal, paste this magic phrase, type a password, go to system prefs, find where this setting is, and pick this new option." That's jumping through a bunch of hoops, and some users will have issues with it. Sideloading on Android is pretty easy but getting people to use sideloaded apps is really difficult for the same reason.
Regardless of how easy or difficult it seems to do, the problem is that Gatekeeper's claimed to be a security feature to help protect against malware. By using it to block non-malware by developers Apple has decided to unperson, its claimed purpose is undermined. Now you'll have non-technical people blindly disabling it because legitimate software is being blocked, opening themselves up to real malware concerns, because Apple decided to use its supposed anti-malware feature as a weapon against a legitimate developer.
It's like when people were disabling Windows Vista's UAC prompts for being intrusive and annoying, completely undermining a real security feature, except that with Apple it's malice instead of incompetence.