Pavel Jelic In today's IT roundup, we look at how Fortnite on iOS and iPadOS violates App Store rules. In the next piece of news, we'll talk more about a security bug that plagues some processors from Qualcomm. In the third news item, we will then look at a survey of whether WeChat users would give up their iPhones and other Apple devices if it were banned. Let's get straight to the point.
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Fortnite is in violation of App Store rules
You have most likely heard of a game called Fortnite at least once. It is quite possible that some of you play Fortnite from time to time, you may know it easily, but also from your children, or from the Internet itself, as it is quite often talked about. This game is currently one of the most popular games in the world and is developed by the Epic Games studio. At first, Fortnite was only available on computers, but gradually, mainly due to its popularity, it also found its way to mobile phones and Mac computers. There are two currencies available in Fortnite – one you earn by playing and the other currency you have to purchase with real money. This currency, which players must purchase with real money, is called V-Bucks. In Fortnite, thanks to it, you can buy many different things that will change the style of your play, for example different suits, etc. To make the purchase of V-Bucks as easy as possible for users, there are of course countless different ways to buy them on PC or Mac .
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However, if you play Fortnite on an iPhone or iPad, you could only purchase V-Bucks via the App Store, directly within the application – this is a rule. You probably know that Apple takes a 30% profit from every purchase you make - this applies to both the apps themselves and their content. At the same time, it must be noted that in the App Store it is not allowed to bypass this payment method in any way. However, in the last update, Fortnite introduced an option that allows you to purchase the in-game currency V-Bucks on your iPhone or iPad directly through the payment gateway directly from Fortnite. For 1000 V-Bucks, you will pay $7.99 through the Fortnite payment gateway, while through the App Store you will pay $2 more for the same number of V-Bucks, i.e. $9.99. In this case, players will of course reach for a cheaper alternative. It is obvious that the developers of Fortnite understandably do not want to share their millions of profits with anyone. For the time being, it is not clear whether Epic Games has reached an agreement with Apple in some way or not. Most likely, however, there was no agreement and the developers will have to remove this payment option from Fortnite, otherwise the application may be withdrawn from the App Store. We'll see how this whole situation plays out.
Qualcomm processors suffer from a serious security flaw
A few months ago, we witnessed hackers discover a serious security hardware flaw in Apple's A11 Bionic and older processors found in all iPhone X and older. Thanks to this bug, it is possible to jailbreak some Apple devices without any problems. Since this is a hardware error, which was named checkm8, there is no way Apple can fix it. This means that the jailbreak will be available for these devices practically forever. However, it should be noted that processors from Apple are not the only ones that contain some security flaws. It was recently discovered that some processors from Qualcomm have similar errors.
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Specifically, the flaws were discovered in the Hexaogon security chips that are part of the Snapdragon processors and were reported by the cybersecurity company Check Point. You must be wondering which processors are involved - we can only tell you their codenames that have been released: CVE-2020-11201, CVE-2020-11202, CVE-2020-11206, CVE-2020-11207, CVE-2020 -11208 and CVE-2020-11209. To us, as ordinary consumers, these cover names mean nothing, but phones from Google, OnePlus, LG, Xiaomi or Samsung may be at risk. A potential attacker could gain control over the processor's firmware due to the aforementioned flaw, which would allow him to upload malware to the device. In this way, an attacker can spy on the user and obtain sensitive data.
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Users react to possible WeChat ban
It's been a few days since we sent you through one of ours IT summaries informed about the fact that the US government, namely President Donald Trump, is considering banning the WeChat platform from the App Store in addition to banning the TikTok application. This platform is very popular in China with over 1,2 billion active users. Specifically, Donald Trump wants to completely ban any transactions between the companies ByteDance (TikTok) and Tencent (WeChat), and quite possibly this ban should apply to all devices and not just Apple ones. If you follow the situation and the position of Apple in the world, you surely know that iPhones are not at all popular in China. Apple is trying to do everything to win over the people of China, but this is definitely not going to help it. All this is confirmed by a new survey in which several Chinese iPhone users were asked if they would give up their Apple phone if the WeChat application was banned from the App Store. In 95% of cases, individuals answered positively, meaning that they would give up their iPhone if WeChat was banned. Of course, this situation would not benefit Apple in the slightest. We'll see if the ban will actually happen, or if it's just screams in the dark that Donald Trump wants to draw attention to.
It would probably like to clarify the correct name of the game - Fortnite. It really isn't Fortine or Fortnine. I have repeated it many times here - you know how bad you are with errors in the text, so always have someone read the articles before publishing them on the web. This is really scary, how low the editors can sink. The Internet will bite everything, but can you imagine this in a newspaper? Have you ever seen even one mistake in a newspaper? I don't remember any. And sorry, there's nothing personal about this, take it in stride.
Hello, of course I'm sorry for writing the wrong name of the game, it doesn't excuse me, anyway everyone makes mistakes sometimes and certainly you too. To be honest, I've seen the error in the newspaper a few times, but it has nothing to do with this. Good night.