Apple Has the Right to Refuse Service to You - DTNS 5228

This right here is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, March 18th, 2026.

We tell you what you need to know.

Give you some important context and do our darnest to help each other understand.

Today the court tells Apple it can kick anyone out of the App Store if it feels like it.

Yeah, don't have to go home, but you can't serve your app here.

I'm Tom Merritt.

And I'm Sarah Lane.

Let's start with what you need to know with that big story.

Yes, indeed.

So thanks to RW Nash for noting this on the DTS subreddit.

Apple has won the right to deny an app from being in its App Store.

That having a show cause.

Doesn't have to say why?

Just doesn't like your looks.

You're out.

Music is the app that brought this court case.

Music is an app launched in 2013 by two Canadian teenagers.

And it wrapped YouTube music videos to make its own music app.

There was no Android version, just an iOS version.

And music claimed that it complied with YouTube's terms of service when it did this.

It let YouTube ads run.

It didn't claim that those were its service.

It was just wrapping them up like a browser would.

However, Apple kicked it off of the App Store in September 2024,

claiming that YouTube objected to the app's use of its intellectual property.

Apple said YouTube says it doesn't like what you're doing, so we're kicking you out.

So music sued claiming that Apple violated its developer program license

agreement, which says, and music quoted this part, Apple may stop offering an app download

if it reasonably believes based on a human or systematic review

that the application infringes intellectual property rights.

And music said, we don't think Apple did a proper review of this.

Because if they did, they would have found out that YouTube's claims were BS.

Music says it does not use the YouTube API, so it should not be limited by API terms.

However, they didn't make their case very well.

US District Judge Umili in the Northern District of California found that Apple can remove apps

with or without cause, because the developer program license agreement says that Apple may,

and I quote, cease marketing offering and allowing download by end users of the app at any time

with or without cause by providing notice of termination.

And nobody was saying that Apple didn't provide the notice, and usually admitted that.

So the judge said, look, you've got it in their agreement that it says they can just tell you,

we're not going to offer your app anymore, they told you, and they didn't.

And since the agreement doesn't say anywhere else, that that right is limited.

In other words, it doesn't say like unless we fail the review or something like that,

then nothing else in the terms can stop them. Apple can basically do whatever it wants.

Judge Lee ordered the complaint from Muzie dismissed with prejudice and without leave to amend.

That means Muzie can't rework it and try to sue again. It basically done.

You're out, Apple gets to keep you out.

A couple of questions here.

My first question is, if Muzie is not using the YouTube API, how is the app being made?

And why?

Does Muzie get any advertising revenue from this wrapped up YouTube video experience?

Yeah, so from what I could tell reading through all of this,

Muzie ran its own ads when you launched the app. That's how they were making their money.

Yeah.

Then it would allow you to start playing the YouTube stuff and they didn't make any money off that.

And they were just doing like a browser does.

At least that's what they say is they were just like, yeah, you basically, you say I want to play this piece of music

and then we pulled it like you would in a browser on YouTube.

We did not use the API to scrape it and pull it in.

Yeah.

Now, they may be right about that.

But what the judge was saying, like it doesn't matter if they're right about that.

Apple decided to look at YouTube and go, oh, you want them out?

They're out.

And Apple has the right to do that.

They were not litigating whether YouTube was right about this or not.

They were litigating whether Apple had the right to kick them out or not.

Yeah, and I think it's probably very frustrating for the folks who are behind Muzie

to say, but wait, we've read the terms of service.

We didn't do anything wrong.

Yeah.

And we should be able to stay.

And Apple goes, YouTube called us and said, we don't like it.

And so you're out.

It's like a bounce around a party.

It's like, you know, sometimes you're just not welcome.

It seems like they should have sued YouTube, honestly.

Right.

And say, you know, you you affected our business negatively by telling someone

something that wasn't true about us.

And I think the judge would have been more amenable to that and maybe dismissed it with prejudice.

If the lawyers had been better, there's there's a bunch of other legalies in here

that are technically did a great job of writing up that cause them to punish the lawyers

for submitting a claim without evidence, basically related to the API stuff, trying to say

that Apple lied when it said they didn't know whether Muzie was using the API or not.

And the judge was like, no, they didn't lie.

And there's a whole long explanation of what it is.

And so she punished them under a very little used rule.

So it sounds to me like they could have used better lawyers maybe.

Yeah.

It's not that they lied.

They just don't like you.

That's right.

It's not lying when they say get out.

Right.

They don't have to have a reason.

Yeah.

It's a good reminder that just because terms of services are in place in all sorts of app stores

that the company who runs that app store, I mean, and there are exceptions, of course.

You could, there could be another lawsuit where this didn't go Apple's way.

But something like this is like, no, we just, you know, we don't, we don't like the app.

We've got some friends over at Google who said, hey, this is, this is not working for us.

And, and we want this app to go away.

And, and now music doesn't really have much to say about it.

Yeah.

I don't even know if Apple and Google are being all that friendly.

It's more than likely to me that Apple said, we got a credible report.

We don't want to have a fight with YouTube about whether this report is right again.

This app has been controversial.

A lot of people wondered how they were legally able to do what they were doing.

Let's not bother with it.

Like, like, let's, let's just, you know, make it.

We don't want, we don't want, we have no dog in this fight.

Yeah, we don't want one.

And we don't want to adopt another dog.

We have plenty.

We have too many dogs.

That's it.

Oh, all the dogs, Apple headquarters.

All right, DTS has made possible by all of you listening.

You might have a dog you might not, but we want to thank you anyway.

Thanks to John Atwood and Pat and Mike Cortez.

All right, there's more we need to know today.

Let's get right into the briefs.

Let's do it.

Researchers at Google I verify and look out discovered that a malicious hacking group

referred to as UNC 63 53 used a toolkit called dark sword to target iPhone users

who visited specific websites from within Ukraine to access personal data and steal cryptocurrency.

Dark sword is capable of accessing passwords, photos, browser history,

and messages from WhatsApp and Telegram.

It was designed to infect a device and then erase itself after a few minutes.

So basically, we have a bunch of stuff and then make like a tree and get out of here.

This follows Google's identification of an iPhone hacking toolkit developed by an US defense contractor

called Karuna, which was used by Russians to target Ukrainians and later by Chinese criminals.

Dark sword also appears to have been professionally designed for government use.

Yeah, so a lot of people in the security community, I think, are looking at this

as an interesting example of iOS being more crackable than maybe its reputation implies

since we have two of these professional tools.

These are very sophisticated tools.

It's not like you or I could just easily vibe code a crack of iOS.

But here are two, one right after the other.

I think the other thing people might have questions is like, wait a minute.

I thought WhatsApp was end end encrypted.

How are they getting these messages?

Well, guess what?

When you're at the end, then it's unencrypted, right?

That's how you're able to see messages on WhatsApp.

So that's what's going on here is they are getting to the end where they are unencrypted

and then somehow being able to read them off of the device.

But these are pretty sophisticated cracks.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of hint ringing from folks saying, you know, iOS, it's supposed to be safe and locked down

and these things aren't supposed to happen.

It is a very specific, it seems to be very specifically targeted.

And so I don't personally look at this and go, oh, no, I can't use my iPhone anymore.

But it is a great reminder that if you visit a malicious site using all sorts of different OSs,

then you can get got.

Yeah, be careful where you go as always.

But you're right.

You know, darksword specifically needed you to be in Ukraine.

It was actually checking IP addresses.

It was like, if they're in Ukraine and they go to this site, we don't want to waste our time

collecting data on a bunch of people outside Ukraine.

We're specifically going after people in Ukraine.

So that, I mean, it's not great for Ukrainians, of course, but it is a more targeted use of this,

which implies that this is definitely a military use as part of the war in Ukraine.

And the topic has two court cases against the US going on.

We've been talking about these on DTS.

We had a good rundown yesterday of where we are on this.

Both of the court cases are part of the same issue.

And the topic is suing to contest the US designating it as a supply chain risk.

And the topic has also asked the court to stay that designation.

So one court case is disputing it all together.

The other is saying, while we do the court case about disputing it, can you stop it from being enforced

until that other court case wraps up pretty typical moving cases like this.

A hearing on whether the judge will grant that stay will happen on Tuesday, March 24th.

And in advance of that, the US Department of Defense filed its arguments.

Why a state should not be granted every each side gets to file their reasons for that.

Among the 40 pages of the DOD filing, the DOD says Anthropic poses a quote,

unacceptable risk to national security, because it might, and I quote again, attempt to disable its technology

or preemptively alter the behavior of its model.

And that could disrupt actual war fighting operations just because Anthropic feels that its corporate red lines are being crossed.

That line of argument does not seem to be well received by most legal experts I've been reading today.

They all say, the judge is going to ask, okay, they could do that.

And you can stop them from doing that by not having them as a customer.

Why did you need to go the further step of declaring them a supply chain risk?

Why is that necessary? That argument does not seem to be well made in this filing.

I was talking to a friend this morning, and this friend just doesn't follow tech news as much as we do.

And she was like, what's the big news today?

And I said, well, yeah, there's quite a bit, quite a bit of news.

But this was one of the stories that I went through.

And she had a question that I think a lot of people probably also have.

And it's like, okay, if Anthropic and the Department of Defense can't come to an agreement,

doesn't the Department of Defense have the capacity to make something on their own and not have to use Anthropic at all?

Yes. In fact, our next story is going to be about them doing exactly that.

They don't have to do business with that.

They are not going to do business with Anthropic.

And that's well within the rights to do that.

To say like, you know what, we don't like the way you're approaching these two red lines that we discussed on yesterday's show.

Then we're not going to use you anymore.

Supply chain risk is supposed to be used when you say anybody doing business with that company risks their security.

The reasoning they're giving in this filing is it risked the security because they might stop you from using a couple of their features.

And I don't see how that connects if the Pentagon isn't using them.

Then you're not using any of their features.

So I don't think it's a risk anymore if you've done that.

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

I don't know. Maybe the judge will see something in it that I don't.

Well, as you mentioned, the Department of Defense would like to work with other companies.

MIT Technology Review reports that the DOD plans to collaborate with companies to train their large language models on classified information for military uses.

You might say, hmm, is this a good idea?

This would give more accurate and more detailed responses specifically for military questions.

The models would be trained on the same data centers used to store classified information and wouldn't be accessible elsewhere.

Some LLM company staff might be given classified clearance in order to help run the training.

Somebody's got to do it.

Open AI and XAI recently signed agreements with the DOD as well.

Yeah, so a lot of this is very uncontroversial.

Giving a corporate contractor classified clearance is necessary in a lot of cases in order for them to do their job.

You have to be very careful about that.

You have to make sure they know the rules of the road on that.

And there's training programs for all of that.

Not saying it's perfect, but it's not unusual.

So I wouldn't get too freaked out about that.

The one criticism I've seen people say is that if they do this, which I think personally is a great idea.

Like you want your model to work better, train it on your own data.

Great.

Military's doing that.

That's great.

That's going to make that model work better.

But the other thing is when you've trained it on your own data, it can output your own data.

And you want to make sure that people in the DOD aren't getting this chatbot from open AI

to give them information that they don't have clearance to know.

Right?

So how do you manage that?

Because there's different levels of clearance.

Not saying that's impossible for them to do, but that's one concern I've seen raised that makes sense to me anyway.

Well, if you want product reviews from folks who actually use technology will be on that first week or two of initial thoughts.

We do that.

The show is called Live With It.

And this week Jason Howell and I are breaking down his experience using the Oakley meta smart glasses.

Get Live With It wherever you get your podcasts and better yet.

We do a video version.

You can watch that at youtube.com slash daily tech news show.

You got to see Jason and his glasses.

They're pretty fly.

And now some quick headlines that are good to know and will make you look prettier or possibly smarter.

I would like both Tom.

Fitbit announced new features and public preview that improve its detection of sleep stages by 15% as well as a new sleep score.

Everybody's doing the sleep score these days and coming next month the ability to link health records with the Fitbit app.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Better.

Better sleep.

I'm into that.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has issued new guidance that payment stable coins.

So those are coins linked to a currency like a dollar and used simply to transact payments.

Digital collectibles.

NFTs NFTs and digital commodities should be treated as non securities.

Non securities have fewer disclosure requirements than commodities.

If you want to keep it straight in your head commodities are things like gold or wheat or oil.

Securities are things like stocks or bonds.

So they're saying a payment stable coin is, you know, like a barrel of oil.

Okay.

I can see why many people would want that to be the case.

Samsung was literally a barrel of oil in many cases.

Right.

Samsung has agreed to supply more high bandwidth memory and DDR5 memory for AMD chips and has announced that it may shift from quarterly or yearly to three to five year contracts for memory supplies to ease concerns about shortages.

Samsung, I don't think we're using a lot of concerns, but you know, let's, let's give it a try.

Yeah, the big thing there is people have been assuming that they would cut down the contracts because of the shifting prices.

So saying, we'll give you a five year contract at the exact same price that it is right now.

Would, would, would definitely make a company feel a little bit like in theory that's fewer fluctuation.

Yeah, exactly.

Andthropic AWS GitHub Google Microsoft and open AI have all combined to give $12.5 million, which is a lot of money for me.

Not a lot of money for those five companies, but maybe that's all that's needed because they're given it to the Linux foundations alpha omega project to help open source projects cope with the increased number of bug reports generated by LLMs.

So basically the five companies responsible for all of these increased bug reports are saying, let me give you some money to help you deal with the bug reports.

Yeah.

You're only going to get more of them, but we're going to give you money to help to help deal with them.

Here's a check.

I mean, I guess that means just hiring more people.

Yeah.

Yeah, probably or helping develop systems, all that kind of thing.

Yeah.

In video says it has finally received purchase orders from Chinese companies for its H 200 chips.

The US eased restrictions on selling these chips and China back in December, but China slowed approvals for their purchase.

Sources sources sources tell Reuters.

I almost got those two confused that Nvidia plans to sell its groc that's groc with a queue inference chips to Chinese companies as well.

Oh, the chips are finally flowing there.

Scientists that the large Hadron Collider have discovered a new particle that is like a proton, but with two charm quarks rather than two up quarks.

If you know, you're a particle physicist.

Anyway, the upshot is that makes it four times as massive as the proton.

And what do we get out of that, Tom?

We get to know a new particle.

And the next step is to figure out what that means.

Is there anything we can do with that particle?

Yeah.

This is a really big proton.

Now what?

Party.

Party coal.

Apple senior director of home devices is leaving the company to join or a health.

Oh, that's not good for them.

Is it?

It's not.

Well, I mean, it's good for or I suppose.

Oh, I sure.

Yeah.

Makes me think or is going to be expanding into devices rather than it's very successful ring.

Yeah.

And it doesn't mean good things for apples devices, which is, you know.

Yeah.

A lot of what a lot of executive shifting as it wait.

The European Union announced EU Inc a plan to let companies incorporate once across the entire

27 member block and do it within 48 hours.

The idea is to make it easier for startups to get up and running.

A new LLM called Hunter Alpha appeared on open router on March 11th, performing well and sparking

some speculation that it may be the next version of deep seek.

Microsoft says it may sue to stop open AI from offering its frontier product through AWS.

Microsoft still has some exclusivity agreements with open AI specifically over API calls.

API calls have to go through Azure, but Amazon and open AI say they found a way to offer

stateful access to frontier to businesses without eating API access.

And they're all fighting about whether that's true.

Epic Games will return to the Google Play Store globally on March 19th.

You might recall it returned to the US in December.

Yeah.

We're getting peace in our gaming world.

One of the biggest Xbox exclusive starfield is going to come to the Sony PS5 on April 7th.

How about that?

Meta plans to open a retail store in Manhattan.

That's New York City at a 687 Fifth Avenue, a big shopping district.

It also operates stores in Los Angeles and in the San Francisco Bay area.

Ooh, fancy Fifth Avenue.

Well, you won't be able to get horizon worlds on the VR headset you buy at that fancy Fifth Avenue store

because Meta announced the date of the shutdown of horizon worlds on VR.

It actually is going to get delisted from the App Store March 31st and then it shuts down entirely June 15th.

However, as we talked about before, you will continue to be able to access horizon worlds on mobile.

Yeah, for how long though, there's all sorts of meta VR stuff that's got me bummed out these days.

Yeah, but they're open in a store.

Right.

More quests.

Yeah.

What do you play?

We don't know.

The Fire Fox announced a new mascot called Kits who will appear in marketing as well as in the browser itself

when you're just getting started, discovering a new feature, making a major configuration change,

and other moments.

Hey, Kit.

Hi.

I see you're trying to look at your browser history.

I'm Kit.

Kit, if you're not clippy, then everyone may love you.

Hard to say.

Kit has got a cute.

I'll give you that.

Well, yeah.

Wall Street Journal has a good read about companies beginning to track the cost of its employees LLM usage

to see who is using the tools well.

If you're using them costly, did your productivity go up?

Because if you're costing the company a lot of money on tokens and your productivity did not go up,

they're going to have a talk with you.

So don't waste those tokens.

We like to end every episode of DTNS.

In fact, we do do this every episode of DTNS.

And we do like doing it, but we also do it.

We like it, but we also do it.

Even if we didn't like it, we would still do it because we like shared perspectives.

We love them.

Today, Phil has more thoughts on our discussion from Monday about running open-claw-based products.

Yeah.

I really appreciate this perspective.

Phil wrote, I wanted to have a play with open-claw, keeping it sandboxed, but not wanting to spend too much money on an experiment.

I decided to try a managed hosted solution.

Got me up and running quickly, but I soon ran into problems because it was running in a pre-built docker container on virtual Linux server.

And there were so many layers of abstraction that I couldn't use standard commands to set it up.

So it was hard to follow any best practice advice out there.

Then I remembered that I had an old Raspberry Pi 5 laying around unused.

So chucked an Ubuntu image on it and installed open-claw, and it's been working fine since.

I've still not really found the killer use case for me yet, but as I don't need it to have access to desktop applications,

just third-party services like WhatsApp and a dedicated email address.

And I'm not running any actual models on the device.

The low-spec Raspberry Pi is working perfectly fine for me.

Loving the shows, I've only been a regular for a couple of years, but can't live without it now.

Keep up the great work.

I'm really happy to hear that, Phil.

And very cool about running it on the Raspberry Pi.

Isn't that funny?

We don't always have that Raspberry Pi 5 laying around, but there is often a project where I go,

yeah, I just don't know what, wait a second.

That Windows laptop that's in my closet might actually be the right call here.

I got something I could pull out for this.

I think a lot of us have one or two things in our back pocket that might be good for a project like this.

Andrew and Montreal also wrote in, sorry to be the language police.

The Swiss Roche Farm Company does not have anything to do with insects in New York apartments,

but Roche makes drugs.

Now, I think I have the one who said Roche yesterday.

I don't know.

Because I was like, I said Roche.

Yeah.

Roche.

So thank you, Andrew.

But yes.

When you say you're sorry to be the language police though, I'm not sure if I believe you.

Yeah.

I think you're happy to be the language police.

But you know what?

We appreciate that.

Yes.

Thank you.

That is well.

Pronunciation is good.

Speaking of things that you look up on YouTube, boy do I look up a lot of pronunciations.

And there's always one out there.

Yeah.

Whoever is doing all of those, bless you.

What are you thinking about?

If you have insight into anything that we talked about on the show or something that you want us to cover on a future show, share with us.

Feed back at dailytechnewshow.com.

Big thanks to Phil and Andrew R for contributing to today's show.

Thank you for being along for daily tech news show.

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