alt Hacker News> How far down does this go? Should I be able to contact the individual person who picked the specific strawberries in my carton of strawberries?
Down to the manufacturer of the whole product you're buying. In the case of your strawberries that would probably be the farmer.
> In the Walmart t-shirt example, should I have the contact info for not only the factory but the other suppliers who made the dyes, threads, cotton, the people who made the fuel for the harvester, the people who welded the tractor together?
No.
> Sure, maybe your idealist answer is yes, but from a practical standpoint as the end consumer there is a stopping point.
Of course there is. But you as the sole dev of an app are not at that point.
> My point is that Apple handles the money and the refunds, and they make all the software APIs. Completely closed platform. Why doesn’t the buck stop there?
My local electronics shop also handles the money and refunds when I buy a Dell. I can still get a refund directly from Dell if my machine breaks (not that I actually have a Dell). Yay reasonable laws.
The platform being closed and all the APIs being controlled by Apple are different problems that should be solved separately (which the EU is working on!).
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I see your point and I think it's a reasonable one.
I know this may seem like moving goalposts, but I forgot to mention another point here, which is that I'm perfectly happy with allowing my customers to reach me by mail and they actually can reach me that way. What I'm much less okay with is someone knowing where my family and I sleep.
I have a mail forwarding service so that I don't have to give out my home address. If you send me mail to that address, I will see it!
It's another cost and hassle to have to set this up just to avoid the rare but possible doxxing situation that comes along with putting things out in public. The other part of this is that big corporations are obviously much better equipped to handle this scenario and they don't represent a single person's reputation or literal home in the same way.
I realize that addresses aren't really private but you never know what can happen. Maybe my app blows up and goes viral, there's some kind of controversy that gets out of my control via the media or something like that, and now my App Store listing for my viral app has my home address and a bunch of people on the Internet start sending me poop in the mail.
Now, all of this may be more of the fault of EU regulations and that's also perfectly fine but it makes me wonder a little bit if there can't be some kind of solution that is compliant but a little friendlier to small/solo businesses? If it's not possible I can definitely accept that.
> Down to the manufacturer of the whole product you're buying.
In case of an app, what is the "product" you are buying? Because according to Apple, they add a lot of "value" by ensuring the software is safe, performant, etc etc. Am I not buying "a safe, checked app"? Or am I buying an app and then separately pay Apple for an added service of "checking the app for safety" etc etc. I'd very much presume the first.
But if its separate, "an app" can be rather ambigous. For a one-time-purchase game, its clear. But many apps are really a service or even more that happen to have "an app" as one of the ways to interact with the service: Netflix, Uber, protonmail, Vinted (or ebay), etc etc: the app isn't the thing I buy. It's a wrapper around a service. Or even just one of the portals through which I can buy stuff. Point being: It's not simple, so your answers don't fit the analogy of "wallmart".