I recently (last week) got a new iPad and had to log into Netflix and typed my email address wrong and was met with a popup saying “If you’re trying to sign up through the app, you can’t. We know, it’s ridiculous.”
Videos, security, behavior etc wise, are all the same (as long as they use the same codecs). It's the video player code that matters and might have be audited, not each video.
Games and apps are obviously different, as they have dynamic behavior.
On top of that, Netflix has already set the precedent for interactive video controlled from iOS devices.
What is Apple's argument for allowing the choose-your-own-adventure Netflix titles (without per-title review) but disallowing more fine-grained interactivity?
That's not the case. It literally is sending user input to the server, where the game is running, and then you watch a video back. That's the base technology that underlies every single gaming streaming service (to date, at least).
It IS the same logic because these are game STREAMING services. You send gamepad inputs and it sends video back. There's no security risk, the code running on the local device never changes.
On Stadia, games are rendered/run on Google servers. Nothing is running on the user's device. From the device's perspective, Stadia is just an app to capture gamepad input, send it to Google servers and play the video response (AV1, VP9 or h264).
Even simpler: Stadia is the remote desktop rebranded. Want to run your own Stadia? Buy a bunch of VMs on some cloud hosting provider: a few for the game server engine and one per user with game client code (those need GPUs); then let users remote desktop into the client VMs. Did I miss anything?
I agree - it's pretty simple. Videos are not games. Literally different words. If you think that Apple is in the wrong here, guys, you should just switch to Android. It's a private company and they can do what they want. I appreciate their oversight, because now I know that I can't get hacked by Microsoft allowing bad games on their app!
> Videos are not games. Literally different words.
Well yes, but this is a game streaming app. It just captures input from the user and sends back a video of the game, running in the cloud.
> It's a private company and they can do what they want.
And we are individuals who can complain as much as we want; this is a non-argument.
> I appreciate their oversight, because now I know that I can't get hacked by Microsoft allowing bad games on their app!
The games are totally isolated from your phone, so they can't hack you, unless they're somehow using the input from your phone as a ridiculously low-bandwidth side channel.
You do realize that the games are not installed to the phone, right? But my point being that I can watch this game on YouTube but I cannot stream the desktop of a nearby datacenter and send my control input to it to stream the same game on my device, because Apple needs to validate the content on one of the apps before I can use it.
I'd imagine it depends on what granularity "interaction" means:
1. Do you have a chatbox/channel in-game?
2. Can you plug-in usernames/passwords to login to your game accounts?
3. Is your game account tied to social networks etc?
34. If you purchased the game outside of the streaming company and had that tied to a credit card etc then can a notorious game streamed through the app make you inadvertently rack up charges on that card?
I'm just spit-balling here. These are the top attack vectors that come to mind. IDK, maybe I'm thinking wayyyyy outta the box here.