Apple has re­moved Epic Games’ bat­tle royale game Fortnite from the App Store af­ter the de­vel­oper on Thursday im­ple­mented its own in-app pay­ment sys­tem that by­passed Apple’s stan­dard 30 per­cent fee

The de­ci­sion marks a sig­nif­i­cant es­ca­la­tion in the feud be­tween Epic and one of the world’s most dom­i­nant mo­bile soft­ware mar­ket­places. It also comes at an es­pe­cially fraught time for Apple as the iPhone maker nav­i­gates an­titrust con­cerns over its op­er­a­tion of the App Store and the rules it im­poses on cer­tain de­vel­op­ers.

Following the re­moval, Epic re­vealed a care­fully cal­cu­lated se­ries of re­sponses, in­clud­ing an an­titrust law­suit seek­ing to es­tab­lish Apple’s App Store as a mo­nop­oly and a protest video that aired on YouTube and within Fortnite it­self mock­ing the iPhone mak­er’s iconic “1984” ad and call­ing on gam­ing fans to #FreeFortnite by sup­port­ing its fight against Apple.

Apple said in a state­ment to The Verge that it plans to work with Epic to “resolve these vi­o­la­tions” but that it has no in­ten­tion to cre­ate a “special arrange­ment” for the com­pany. Here’s the com­pa­ny’s state­ment in full:

Today, Epic Games took the un­for­tu­nate step of vi­o­lat­ing the App Store guide­lines that are ap­plied equally to every de­vel­oper and de­signed to keep the store safe for our users. As a re­sult their Fortnite app has been re­moved from the store. Epic en­abled a fea­ture in its app which was not re­viewed or ap­proved by Apple, and they did so with the ex­press in­tent of vi­o­lat­ing the App Store guide­lines re­gard­ing in-app pay­ments that ap­ply to every de­vel­oper who sells dig­i­tal goods or ser­vices.

Epic has had apps on the App Store for a decade, and have ben­e­fited from the App Store ecosys­tem - in­clud­ing its tools, test­ing, and dis­tri­b­u­tion that Apple pro­vides to all de­vel­op­ers. Epic agreed to the App Store terms and guide­lines freely and we’re glad they’ve built such a suc­cess­ful busi­ness on the App Store. The fact that their busi­ness in­ter­ests now lead them to push for a spe­cial arrange­ment does not change the fact that these guide­lines cre­ate a level play­ing field for all de­vel­op­ers and make the store safe for all users. We will make every ef­fort to work with Epic to re­solve these vi­o­la­tions so they can re­turn Fortnite to the App Store.

Epic im­ple­mented its own pay­ment sys­tem in the Android ver­sion of Fortnite as well, lead­ing Google to take sim­i­lar ac­tion and re­move the game from the Play Store. Android users, how­ever, can still down­load Fortnite us­ing Epic’s own app launcher, which it dis­trib­utes in­de­pen­dently through any mo­bile web browser.

“The open Android ecosys­tem lets de­vel­op­ers dis­trib­ute apps through mul­ti­ple app stores. For game de­vel­op­ers who choose to use the Play Store, we have con­sis­tent poli­cies that are fair to de­vel­op­ers and keep the store safe for users,” a Google spokesper­son tells The Verge. “While Fortnite re­mains avail­able on Android, we can no longer make it avail­able on Play be­cause it vi­o­lates our poli­cies. However, we wel­come the op­por­tu­nity to con­tinue our dis­cus­sions with Epic and bring Fortnite back to Google Play.”

Epic’s ap­proach seems de­signed to pro­voke Apple (and to a much lesser ex­tent Google) into a re­sponse, as the Fortnite stu­dio ex­plic­itly laid out in its new iOS up­date how us­ing Epic’s in-app pay­ment sys­tem would re­sult in cheaper prices. For in­stance, 1,000 V-bucks, which is roughly equiv­a­lent to $10 in-game Fortnite cur­rency, now costs just $7.99 if you use Epic di­rect pay­ment in­stead of the stan­dard Apple pay­ment pro­cess­ing. Normally, that amount of cur­rency costs $9.99. Epic says, in this case, cus­tomers keep the ex­tra sav­ings, not the com­pany. That cast the new arrange­ment as a pro-con­sumer move in­stead of a greedy power play.

As of right now, those who have al­ready down­loaded Fortnite on iOS are still able to ac­cess the game; only new down­loads are dis­abled as a re­sult of Apple pulling the game from the App Store. You can even still use Epic’s in-app pay­ment sys­tem, ac­cord­ing to The Washington Post’s Gene Park, who used both Apple and Epic pay­ment sys­tems to pur­chase v-bucks.

It was ini­tially un­clear how up­dates to Fortnite will func­tion — some users who have the game down­loaded but have not opened it a while re­ported that up­date files are still; down­load­ing nor­mally — but Epic would have to get the game re­in­stated in the App Store to push sub­stan­tial fu­ture changes to the iOS ver­sion. The com­pany clar­i­fied in a FAQ posted to its web­site that the game would con­tinue to func­tion as nor­mal up un­til the re­lease of Chapter 2 - Season 4. Following that, “players ac­cess­ing Fortnite will still be able to play the 13.40 ver­sion of Fortnite, but will not be able to ac­cess any new con­tent or the new Battle Pass,” the FAQ reads.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has long com­plained that mo­bile app stores no longer jus­tify the 30 per­cent cut they take from all de­vel­op­ers, and he’s called for sub­stan­tial changes to how com­pa­nies like Apple and Google con­duct busi­ness with third-party de­vel­op­ers. “It’s time for change,” Sweeney told The Verge in 2018. “Apple, Google, and Android man­u­fac­tur­ers make vast, vast prof­its from the sale of their de­vices and do not in any way jus­tify the 30 per­cent cut.” Epic launched a game store on PC in which it takes only 12 per­cent of rev­enue as a way to try to en­cour­age a sim­i­lar change in com­peti­tor Valve’s Steam mar­ket­place.

The de­bate is larger than just the 30 per­cent cut. Apple is fac­ing height­ened crit­i­cism these days over how it not only man­ages the App Store and its manda­tory fees, but also for how it ap­plies its guide­lines in ways some de­vel­op­ers and crit­ics feel is un­fair and may in fact be de­signed to ben­e­fit Apple over its com­peti­tors.

For in­stance, Apple re­cently gave Amazon an ex­emp­tion to the 30 per­cent fee when sell­ing TV show and movie rentals through its Prime Video app, some­thing the com­pany says is only al­lowed for cer­tain stream­ing video plat­forms. Additionally, court doc­u­ments re­leased dur­ing the Big Tech an­titrust hear­ing last month re­vealed Apple cut a spe­cial deal with Amazon in 2016 to lower the fees it takes on Prime Video sub­scrip­tions from 30 per­cent down to 15 per­cent to get Amazon’s app on the App Store.

Meanwhile, four years later, Apple just laid out why it will never ap­prove cloud gam­ing apps and game sub­scrip­tion ser­vices like Microsoft’s xCloud and Xbox Game Pass as well as Google Stadia. Apple’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for do­ing so — that it can­not in­di­vid­u­ally re­view all of the games of­fered by cloud gam­ing plat­forms as it would stan­dard iOS apps — pro­voked Sweeney to is­sue an­other harsh con­dem­na­tion. “Apple has out­lawed the meta­verse,” he wrote on Twitter. “The prin­ci­ple they state, taken lit­er­ally, would rule out all cross-plat­form ecosys­tems and games with user cre­ated modes: not just XCloud, Stadia, and GeForce NOW, but also Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox.”

Since Fortnite first ar­rived on mo­bile in 2018, the game has ex­isted as a stan­dard iOS app; Sweeney has openly said his com­pany only did so be­cause there is no other way to en­ter Apple’s closed ecosys­tem. That means Apple has taken 30 per­cent of all in-app pur­chases of Fortnite cur­rency used to pur­chase its bat­tle pass sub­scrip­tion ser­vice and the cos­metic skins, emotes, and other dig­i­tal goods that make the bat­tle royale one of the most lu­cra­tive en­ter­tain­ment prop­er­ties on the planet. Fortnite earned Epic $2.4 bil­lion in 2018 and $1.8 bil­lion in 2019, helped in large part by its pop­u­lar­ity across plat­forms, as play­ers can use the same ac­count across iOS, Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

Epic pre­vi­ously by­passed Google’s Play Store on Android by re­leas­ing Fortnite as a di­rect down­load through its own soft­ware launcher. But the stu­dio even­tu­ally re­lented ear­lier this year af­ter fail­ing to ap­peal Google for an ex­emp­tion of its sim­i­lar 30 per­cent cut of all in-app pur­chases. “After 18 months of op­er­at­ing Fortnite on Android out­side of the Google Play Store, we’ve come to a ba­sic re­al­iza­tion,” reads Epic’s state­ment. “Google puts soft­ware down­load­able out­side of Google Play at a dis­ad­van­tage.”

Epic’s state­ment at the time was trans­par­ent in its dis­plea­sure at how Google, and by ex­ten­sion Apple, treat third-party soft­ware that does­n’t abide by its rules. Epic also later joined Match Group, the par­ent com­pany of Tinder and other dat­ing apps, in is­su­ing state­ments of sup­port for two on­go­ing an­titrust in­ves­ti­ga­tions into Apple con­ducted by the European Union, launched only af­ter Spotify and other app mak­ers protested App Store poli­cies they say un­fairly pun­ish Apple com­peti­tors.

Update August 13th, 7:18PM ET: Added com­ment from Google re­gard­ing its re­moval of Fortnite from the Play Store.

Hello,

the at­mos­phere in the last week was kind of spe­cial. We ex­pe­ri­enced the feel­ing of the fi­nal re­lease be­ing on the hori­zon many times. And we were shown that it is­n’t the case time and time again. So it feels very spe­cial when it is ac­tu­ally be­com­ing re­al­ity. We were try­ing to be es­pe­cially care­ful with any last minute changes to make sure that we don’t in­tro­duce ma­jor bugs into our pre­cious 1.0 re­lease. The im­age of all the play­ers hav­ing the game crash on some sim­ple stu­pid bug is hor­ri­fy­ing.

People thanked us on many oc­ca­sions for the hard work we do. It helped lift our mood in many of the des­per­ate mo­ments, when bugs and prob­lems were pil­ing up and we did­n’t see the end of the tun­nel. We don’t say it of­ten enough, but the sup­port from your side has been in­cred­i­bly help­ful through­out the years.

We thank all who helped us to save the game be­fore it could even start by sup­port­ing the IndieGoGo cam­paign back in 2013.

We are grate­ful for all of the 18,855 bug re­ports. They were in­valu­able feed­back that helped us reach our level of game sta­bil­ity.

We value al­most all of the feed­back to our FFF and game re­leases. A lot of game im­prove­ments came out of it.

We ap­pre­ci­ate the work and cre­ativ­ity that went into cre­at­ing the 5,603 mods. It cer­tainly ex­tends the po­ten­tial for a lot of peo­ple, and the ideas be­came a great in­spi­ra­tion for us.

All the on­line videos, ar­ti­cles and streams were im­mensely help­ful to spread the word.

We thank all who helped with the Crowdin trans­la­tions, al­low­ing the game to be played in a lot of dif­fer­ent lan­guages with­out us hav­ing to man­age it di­rectly.

We are grate­ful that peo­ple spon­ta­neously helped to man­age the Wiki and cre­ated some great tools, like cal­cu­la­tors, cheat sheets or blue­print data­bases.

We value the ef­fort put into or­gan­is­ing events, like fMMO, Clustorio etc.

We ap­pre­ci­ate that our com­mu­nity is very civilised, and peo­ple who con­tribute are gen­er­ally nice to each other, and keep­ing the crit­i­cism on the con­struc­tive side.

And, lastly, we would like to thank all of you who bought the game, and al­lowed all of this to hap­pen.

It took us 8.5 years. It has been an in­cred­i­ble ride and we have ar­rived at the des­ti­na­tion!

Factorio is leav­ing early ac­cess. This opens the game up to all the play­ers who just don’t play early ac­cess games, the same with re­view­ers who only cover fin­ished games, which is very un­der­stand­able.

For this spe­cial oc­ca­sion, we cre­ated a launch trailer. It tries to cap­ture the story of the de­vel­op­ment in 45 sec­onds.

Since the main Trailer is kind of time­less, we up­dated it to the 1.0 state of the game.

When we re­leased pretty much all the con­tent in 0.18, there was noth­ing left for 1.0 other than the for­mal­ity of “it is com­plete”. The crash site, nuke, alien dec­o­ra­tives and pol­luted wa­ter are awe­some, but not too im­pact­ful… As a re­sult, we re­ally wanted to add some­thing to make the re­lease spe­cial.

It is a ve­hi­cle that can be dri­ven, or re­motely con­trolled.

It can tra­verse ob­sta­cles and small bod­ies of wa­ter.

It has a built-in radar, and you can place blue­prints in its vicin­ity.

It has an equip­ment grid, so it can build with con­struc­tion ro­bots and use com­bat equip­ment.

It has four rapid-fir­ing rocket launch­ers that can shoot au­to­mat­i­cally.

It can be re­searched very late in the game (all sci­ence packs ex­cept Space).

Multiple of them can be de­ployed at the same time, but each re­quires its own linked con­troller.

This all means it can be used as a tank up­grade, a less au­to­mated ver­sion of ar­tillery, or a builder/​re­pairer. We look for­ward to see­ing what other uses you can in­vent.

We haven’t added it ear­lier as we saw it just as a gim­mick with­out much con­tri­bu­tion to the game­play me­chan­ics. This changed rather re­cently, when we had the idea of the re­mote con­trol com­bined with the equip­ment grid. So we de­cided to ex­tend our al­ready crazy todo list, and add it as a last minute bonus.

We were do­ing the best we could, to fix all the rel­e­vant bugs and is­sues for the 1.0 re­lease, but we just could­n’t do every­thing. So we had to pri­ori­tise just the more crit­i­cal stuff. We would still like to ad­dress all of the re­main­ing is­sues as there are cur­rently around 150 bugs on the fo­rums and around 80 in­ter­nal tasks to be solved. The plan is to even­tu­ally go through all of them, and de­cide on how to re­solve each one.

A good ex­am­ple is, that we have a “continue” but­ton, but it just ig­nores mul­ti­player. You press con­tinue au­to­mat­i­cally just to find out, that you are build­ing alone for half an hour. It is my (kovarex) per­sonal story ac­tu­ally.

This means, that 1.1 is go­ing to just fo­cus on fill­ing the most ob­vi­ous gaps in our ex­ist­ing fea­ture set, not on adding some new ma­jor con­tent.

When we started with the Friday facts, it was at a time when we worked a lot, but if there was­n’t any re­lease for a while, peo­ple were start­ing to ask whether the game is still be­ing worked on. So this was our first mo­ti­va­tion. Eventually we learned many ad­di­tional ad­van­tages of the blog, other than it be­ing just a dead mans switch.

It es­tab­lished the com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel be­tween us and the com­mu­nity.

It started to be an in­ter­nal every-week mile­stone to get some­thing into a pre­sentable form.

In some cases it even mo­ti­vated us to add a cool last minute fea­ture to make the topic feel more com­plete. (This is how the undo and copy-paste fea­ture was cre­ated for ex­am­ple)

It be­came a great archive of the evo­lu­tion of the game through­out the years. Opening old posts is like read­ing our own di­ary.

It be­came an every Friday habit for us and some of our play­ers too, but we be­lieve now is the right time to stop. There will hardly be a bet­ter mo­ment to do so. It should be very un­der­stand­able that we need a break, and we also need the free­dom to think about the long term with­out the oblig­a­tion to cut it into small chunks for FFF.

Since you can’t ex­pect weekly posts from now on, we wanted a way for you to be no­ti­fied once we have some­thing spe­cial to say. Feel free to give us your email ad­dress so we can let you know.

For now please en­joy the game, and we’ll be back!

Discuss on our fo­rums

Discuss on Reddit

Connecting Mozilla Alumni who are hir­ing with peo­ple who are look­ing

Mozilla has re­cently done two rounds of lay­offs (first and sec­ond), which has af­fected some of the most tal­ented peo­ple I’ve been lucky enough to be­friend and work with.

Mozillians are every­where! It does­n’t mat­ter if you’re a for­mer em­ployee, con­trib­u­tor or sim­ply a fan — if you’re look­ing for a new home, start with this list of Mozillians ac­tively hir­ing kind, pas­sion­ate, awe­some hu­mans.

A great place to find more peo­ple hir­ing and look­ing is the #mozillalifeboat hash­tag on Twitter.

Are you a Mozilla alumni look­ing to hire some­one re­cently laid off?

Add your com­pany

ReadMe makes it easy to build beau­ti­ful, in­ter­ac­tive de­vel­oper hubs for any com­pany that has an API.

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GitHub brings to­gether the world’s largest com­mu­nity of de­vel­op­ers to dis­cover, share, and build bet­ter soft­ware.

A large num­ber of both tech­ni­cal and non-tech­ni­cal roles

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Dropbox is the world’s first smart work­space. We bring all your team’s con­tent to­gether while let­ting you use the tools you love. And we help cut through the clut­ter, sur­fac­ing what mat­ters most.

Client sync de­vel­op­ment, dev plat­form tools, per­for­mance en­gi­neer­ing, EMs, and many non-en­gi­neer­ing roles too

Robinhood is de­moc­ra­tiz­ing fi­nance for all. With cus­tomers at the heart of our de­ci­sions, Robinhood is low­er­ing bar­ri­ers, re­mov­ing fees, and pro­vid­ing greater ac­cess to fi­nan­cial in­for­ma­tion.

A non-profit with a mis­sion of a free, world-class ed­u­ca­tion for any­one, any­where

PagerDuty is a leader in dig­i­tal op­er­a­tions man­age­ment. Teams use PagerDuty to iden­tify is­sues and op­por­tu­ni­ties in real time, and bring to­gether the right peo­ple to fix prob­lems faster and to help pre­vent them in the fu­ture.

We have re-built Microsoft Edge on Chromium open source with the in­tent to pro­vide bet­ter web com­pat­i­bil­ity for our cus­tomers and less frag­men­ta­tion for web de­vel­op­ers. We be­lieve in user pri­vacy, a vi­brant and free web, evolv­ing the web through open stan­dards, and in fun­da­men­tals such as per­for­mance, se­cu­rity, ac­ces­si­bil­ity. We have a lot of ideas for what the fu­ture of Microsoft Edge can be and we’d love yours as well!

Engineers and Product Managers with ex­pe­ri­ence in pri­vacy, me­dia, graph­ics, and per­for­mance analy­sis and tun­ing

We make tools like Jira, Confluence and Trello that are used by thou­sands of teams world­wide. And we’re se­ri­ous about cre­at­ing amaz­ing prod­ucts, prac­tices, and open work for all teams.

CircleCI is the world’s largest shared con­tin­u­ous in­te­gra­tion and con­tin­u­ous de­liv­ery (CI/CD) plat­form, and the cen­tral hub where code moves from idea to de­liv­ery.

Asana helps teams or­ga­nize and man­age all of their work, from small pro­jects to strate­gic ini­tia­tives.

Figma is a de­sign plat­form for teams who build prod­ucts to­gether. Born on the Web, Figma helps the en­tire prod­uct team cre­ate, test, and ship bet­ter de­signs, faster. We make use of the lat­est browser tech­nolo­gies such as WASM, WebGL, IndexedDB to build a rich high per­for­mance end user ex­pe­ri­ence. Read more on https://​www.figma.com/​blog/​sec­tion/​en­gi­neer­ing/

Engineering (Web, Systems, Platform, Infrastructure, Mobile, Enterprise, SRE), Platform Product Manager, Developer Relations (soon), and more

Come to Apple, where thou­sands of in­di­vid­ual imag­i­na­tions gather to­gether to pave the way to in­no­va­tion. Here, you’ll do more than join some­thing — you’ll add some­thing.

Stripe is a tech­nol­ogy com­pany that builds eco­nomic in­fra­struc­ture for the in­ter­net. Businesses of every size—from new star­tups to pub­lic com­pa­nies—use our soft­ware to ac­cept pay­ments and man­age their busi­nesses on­line.

We’re hir­ing across many dif­fer­ent teams and types of roles!

We help peo­ple deepen their un­der­stand­ing of the world and dis­cover ideas that mat­ter.

We’re hir­ing all sorts of en­gi­neers in­clud­ing a Principal Engineer for The Defenders, our Privacy/Trust & Safety team.

We’re a con­sid­er­ate, cu­ri­ous, and eclec­tic crew on a mis­sion to make the Internet a safer place for every­one. 1Password re­mem­bers all your pass­words for you and keeps your dig­i­tal life se­cure and al­ways avail­able, safe be­hind the one pass­word that only you know.

From Rust devs to fron­tend web devs, we’re hir­ing. We’d es­pe­cially love to talk to you if you spe­cial­ize in WebAssembly.

All-in-one se­cure chat app for teams, friends and or­gan­i­sa­tions. Keeps con­ver­sa­tions in your con­trol, safe from data-min­ing and ads. Talk to every­one through the open global Matrix net­work, pro­tected by proper end-to-end en­cryp­tion.

Senior web en­gi­neer, back­end en­gi­neer­ing man­ager, safety en­gi­neer, and more not yet listed on ca­reers page

Splunk Inc. the Data-to-Everything Platform turns data into ac­tion, tack­ling the tough­est IT, IoT, se­cu­rity and data chal­lenges.

A va­ri­ety of tech­ni­cal pro­gram man­age­ment and en­gi­neer­ing po­si­tions across: Product Security, Performance and Systems Testing, Dev Ops, and Full Stack Development

As a PayPal ser­vice, our in­no­v­a­tive pay­ments tech­nol­ogy, scal­able so­lu­tions, and leg­endary white-glove sup­port are backed by one of the world’s largest and most trusted fin­tech brands.

At Cloudflare, we have our eyes set on an am­bi­tious goal: to help build a bet­ter Internet. Today the com­pany runs one of the world’s largest net­works that pow­ers tril­lions of re­quests per month.

While we are still an en­gi­neer­ing com­pany at our core, we need pas­sion­ate peo­ple in all ar­eas of our com­pany. From sales, sup­port, mar­ket­ing, to busi­ness de­vel­op­ment, we’re al­ways look­ing for valu­able team mem­bers that want to make a dif­fer­ence and mean­ing­ful im­pact on the Internet.

Auth0 gives com­pa­nies sim­ple, pow­er­ful and de­vel­oper-friendly iden­tity build­ing blocks so they can free up re­sources to fo­cus on in­no­va­tion

Engineers of all sorts, prod­uct mar­ket­ing, cus­tomer suc­cess, and many more.

Livestreaming video! Twitch is build­ing the fu­ture of live en­ter­tain­ment, and we’d do it even bet­ter with you.

Senior Software Engineers for iOS, Android, Video Protocol and many more open jobs

HubSpot is a busi­ness-to-busi­ness (B2B) soft­ware com­pany. Tens of thou­sands of cus­tomers all over the world use our mar­ket­ing, sales, and cus­tomer suc­cess prod­ucts to grow their busi­nesses. It’s our mis­sion to not just help them grow, but to help them grow bet­ter. That’s how we’ll build a com­pany fu­ture gen­er­a­tions will be proud of.

Coursera is a lead­ing on­line learn­ing plat­form for higher ed­u­ca­tion, where 64 mil­lion learn­ers from around the world come to learn skills of the fu­ture. More than 200 of the world’s top uni­ver­si­ties and in­dus­try ed­u­ca­tors part­ner with Coursera to of­fer courses, Specializations, cer­tifi­cates, and de­gree pro­grams.

Get help from thou­sands of trusted Taskers for every­thing from er­rands to con­tact­less de­liv­er­ies.

Protocol Labs is an open-source re­search, de­vel­op­ment, and de­ploy­ment lab­o­ra­tory. Our pro­jects in­clude IPFS, Filecoin, libp2p, and many more. We aim to make hu­man ex­is­tence or­ders of mag­ni­tude bet­ter through tech­nol­ogy. We are a fully dis­trib­uted com­pany.

Discord is a place to build com­mu­ni­ties to talk reg­u­larly, hang out, and build re­la­tion­ships.

We are hir­ing for many roles across the com­pany, but par­tic­u­larly en­gi­neer­ing, prod­uct, and de­sign. Remote pos­si­ble by role.

Snowflake is the cloud data plat­form with se­cure and easy ac­cess to any data with in­fi­nite scal­a­bil­ity

Etsy is the global mar­ket­place for unique and cre­ative goods.

HackerOne em­pow­ers the world to build a safer in­ter­net. As the world’s most trusted hacker-pow­ered se­cu­rity plat­form, HackerOne con­nects or­ga­ni­za­tions to the largest com­mu­nity of hack­ers on the planet. Armed with the most ro­bust data­base of vul­ner­a­bil­ity trends, hack­ers find and safely re­port se­cu­rity weak­nesses across all at­tack sur­faces.

We’re hir­ing for a range of both tech­ni­cal and non-tech­ni­cal roles.

The mis­sion of the Alexa Household Organization team is to use Alexa to help fam­i­lies stay or­ga­nized and con­nected to each other, build­ing daily habits and mak­ing life run a lit­tle more smoothly.

Shopify is a lead­ing global com­merce com­pany, pro­vid­ing trusted tools to start, grow, mar­ket, and man­age a re­tail busi­ness of any size. Our plat­form and ser­vices that are en­gi­neered for re­li­a­bil­ity, while de­liv­er­ing a bet­ter shop­ping ex­pe­ri­ence for con­sumers every­where.

We’re look­ing for folks to join across R&D (Engineering, Product, UX, Data), along with many open roles in other de­part­ments.

Tesla’s mis­sion is to ac­cel­er­ate the world’s tran­si­tion to sus­tain­able en­ergy. Tesla Energy works to­wards that goal by scal­ing res­i­den­tial + com­mer­cial so­lar, build­ing bat­tery stor­age sys­tems rang­ing from homes to power plants in scale, and sup­port­ing the Tesla car ex­pe­ri­ence with the wall charger and Supercharger net­work.

Care when­ever you need it, in per­son or in your PJs. Safe, same-day care — in our of­fices or over video. Most in­sur­ance ac­cepted.

A num­ber of en­gi­neer­ing jobs are cur­rently avail­able

PayPal is com­mit­ted to de­moc­ra­tiz­ing fi­nan­cial ser­vices and em­pow­er­ing peo­ple and busi­nesses to join and thrive in the global econ­omy.

We are hir­ing for soft­ware en­gi­neers, en­gi­neer­ing man­agers, de­vops en­gi­neers, and more!

Cities are com­pli­cated. We’re us­ing the power of mo­bile and data to help hu­mans sur­vive and mas­ter them. We’re build­ing the best app, with the best rout­ing, and the best data in cities where we can make a dif­fer­ence.

All kinds of roles, in­clud­ing en­gi­neer­ing, de­sign, and busi­ness.

Benchling’s mis­sion is to ac­cel­er­ate the pace of Life Sciences R&D. Every day, sci­en­tists around the world use Benchling’s ap­pli­ca­tions, plat­form, & an­a­lyt­ics in their ef­forts to solve hu­man­i­ty’s most press­ing prob­lems.

Hiring for tech­ni­cal and non-tech­ni­cal roles across the com­pany, in­clud­ing Sales, Design, Product, Engineering, HR, Marketing, and Customer Experience.

We en­vi­sion a world where every stu­dent grad­u­ates, con­fi­dent and pre­pared.

Contentful uni­fies con­tent in a sin­gle hub, struc­tures it for use in any dig­i­tal chan­nel and in­te­grates seam­lessly with hun­dreds of tools through open APIs. It lets de­vel­op­ers and con­tent cre­ators work in par­al­lel, in­creas­ing team ef­fi­ciency and hap­pi­ness.

We’re hir­ing for a wide range of tech and non-tech roles.

Red Hat is an en­ter­prise soft­ware com­pany with an open source de­vel­op­ment model. We are the world’s lead­ing provider of en­ter­prise open source so­lu­tions, us­ing a com­mu­nity-pow­ered ap­proach to de­liver high-per­form­ing Linux, cloud, con­tainer, and Kubernetes tech­nolo­gies.

Start sell­ing to en­ter­prise cus­tomers with just a few lines of code.

Public in­ter­est re­search and ad­vo­cacy on tech and con­sumer prod­ucts

EdgeDB is rein­vent­ing the re­la­tional data­base stack. Through stream­lined data model and pow­er­ful query lan­guage, we make work­ing with data pro­duc­tive, pleas­ant and ef­fi­cient for de­vel­op­ers and data en­gi­neers. And, it’s open source.

We’re look­ing for de­vel­oper ad­vo­cates and for JS/TypeScript, Rust, and/​or Python en­gi­neers.

Amplitude is the lead­ing prod­uct in­tel­li­gence plat­form that helps com­pa­nies use their cus­tomer data to build great prod­uct ex­pe­ri­ences for dig­i­tal growth.

Organize the world’s in­for­ma­tion and make it uni­ver­sally ac­ces­si­ble and use­ful.

Many dif­fer­ent roles in many dif­fer­ent lo­ca­tions.

We are the lead­ing in­de­pen­dent provider of iden­tity for the en­ter­prise. Our vi­sion? To en­able any or­ga­ni­za­tion to use any tech­nol­ogy. And promise to al­ways pro­tect the iden­ti­ties of our cus­tomers’ work­force and cus­tomers.

All de­part­ments and very re­mote friendly

Kong is the world’s most pop­u­lar open source mi­croser­vice API gate­way. Use Kong to se­cure, man­age and or­ches­trate mi­croser­vice APIs.

We are cur­rently hir­ing for full stack en­gi­neers, cloud en­gi­neers, Site Reliability en­gi­neers, front end en­gi­neers and UX de­sign­ers.

At Canva we work to make a sig­nif­i­cant pos­i­tive im­pact on so­ci­ety. Our mis­sion is to de­moc­ra­tise de­sign and em­power cre­ation.

Frontend, back­end, and in­fra en­gi­neers among oth­ers

Datadog is an ob­serv­abil­ity plat­form for cloud-scale ap­pli­ca­tions, pro­vid­ing mon­i­tor­ing of servers, data­bases, tools, ser­vices, logs, and more.

Gives peo­ple the power to build com­mu­nity and bring the world closer to­gether through so­cial me­dia ex­pe­ri­ences.

A whole range in­clud­ing tech­ni­cal (my team is look­ing for Rust en­gi­neers in par­tic­u­lar!), prod­uct, com­mu­nity, … you name it.

The fu­ture of soft­ware de­liv­ery is fo­cused on cloud, con­tain­ers, and server­less. Datawire is build­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of Kubernetes-based plat­forms and tool­ing to sup­port op­er­a­tions and en­gi­neer­ing teams to build, test, and de­liver soft­ware to users rapidly and safely.

Software en­gi­neers (mid-level to se­nior), ac­count ex­ec­u­tives, sales di­rec­tor, Kubernetes evan­ge­list, strate­gic al­liances man­ager and di­rec­tor of mar­ket­ing

CivicActions is a “small” 100 per­son com­pany, with no of­fice since found­ing. We’re mis­sion dri­ven, trans­form­ing gov­ern­ment dig­i­tal ser­vices. And yes, that does cover a wide range of dif­fer­ent types of work!

oso puts se­cu­rity in the hands of the mak­ers. It’s an open source pol­icy en­gine that’s em­bed­ded right in your ap­pli­ca­tion, and it pro­vides a de­clar­a­tive pol­icy lan­guage for ex­press­ing au­tho­riza­tion logic.

We’re hir­ing en­gi­neers and de­vel­oper ad­vo­cates. oso is built in Rust.

We solve data se­cu­rity in cloud col­lab­o­ra­tion plat­forms like GSuite, Box, etc. So com­pany data is­n’t lost, leaked, or stolen. B2B Data Security

We be­lieve smart con­tracts en­able the fu­ture of global eco­nomic co­op­er­a­tion. Agoric pro­vides a safer, sim­pler way to pro­gram smart con­tracts.

EraDB is build­ing a high-per­for­mance, dis­trib­uted data­base ca­pa­ble of sup­port­ing vast amounts of high-car­di­nal­ity, high-di­men­sion­al­ity, time-se­ries data. We have em­braced Rust for our core com­po­nents and be­lieve in en­gi­neer­ing that is in­ten­tional, well-rea­soned, and cor­rect by de­sign. We’re a fully-dis­trib­uted team that is open to re­mote em­ploy­ees in any ge­og­ra­phy.

Checkout-free so­lu­tions for con­ve­nience and gro­cery stores. Using com­puter vi­sion and ma­chine learn­ing to make shop­ping a line­less ex­pe­ri­ence.

At Spruce, we are reimag­in­ing trusted in­ter­ac­tions for en­ter­prises and gov­ern­ments by de­vel­op­ing world-class open source soft­ware im­ple­ment­ing the open W3C Verifiable Credential and Decentralized Identifier stan­dards in iden­tity. We help pack­age be­liefs dig­i­tally in way that pro­tects user pri­vacy.

We are hir­ing pro­gram­mers who love tech­nol­ogy and are com­mit­ted to in­tel­lec­tual hon­esty, user pri­vacy, and in­no­va­tion. We are fully re­mote.

At Clearstep, we be­lieve health­care should be easy. We build tech­nol­ogy that en­ables peo­ple to ac­cess the most use­ful and clear next steps for care.

Series A startup in Toronto. We help com­pa­nies form and de­velop re­la­tion­ships with their chan­nel sales part­ners

Postbox is beau­ti­ful and in­no­v­a­tive email app built on the Mozilla plat­form.

This is a list of awe­some Mozillians look­ing for their next home!

This is a time of change for the in­ter­net and for Mozilla. From com­bat­ting a lethal virus and bat­tling sys­temic racism to pro­tect­ing in­di­vid­ual pri­vacy — one thing is clear: an open and ac­ces­si­ble in­ter­net is es­sen­tial to the fight.

Mozilla ex­ists so the in­ter­net can help the world col­lec­tively meet the range of chal­lenges a mo­ment like this pre­sents. Firefox is a part of this. But we know we also need to go be­yond the browser to give peo­ple new prod­ucts and tech­nolo­gies that both ex­cite them and rep­re­sent their in­ter­ests. Over the last while, it has been clear that Mozilla is not struc­tured prop­erly to cre­ate these new things — and to build the bet­ter in­ter­net we all de­serve.

Today we an­nounced a sig­nif­i­cant re­struc­tur­ing of Mozilla Corporation. This will strengthen our abil­ity to build and in­vest in prod­ucts and ser­vices that will give peo­ple al­ter­na­tives to con­ven­tional Big Tech. Sadly, the changes also in­clude a sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tion in our work­force by ap­prox­i­mately 250 peo­ple. These are in­di­vid­u­als of ex­cep­tional pro­fes­sional and per­sonal cal­iber who have made out­stand­ing con­tri­bu­tions to who we are to­day. To each of them, I ex­tend my heart­felt thanks and deep­est re­grets that we have come to this point. This is a hum­bling recog­ni­tion of the re­al­i­ties we face, and what is needed to over­come them.

As I shared in the in­ter­nal mes­sage sent to our em­ploy­ees to­day, our pre-COVID plan for 2020 in­cluded a great deal of change al­ready: build­ing a bet­ter in­ter­net by cre­at­ing new kinds of value in Firefox; in­vest­ing in in­no­va­tion and cre­at­ing new prod­ucts; and ad­just­ing our fi­nances to en­sure sta­bil­ity over the long term.  Economic con­di­tions re­sult­ing from the global pan­demic have sig­nif­i­cantly im­pacted our rev­enue. As a re­sult, our pre-COVID plan was no longer work­able. Though we’ve been talk­ing openly with our em­ploy­ees about the need for change — in­clud­ing the like­li­hood of lay­offs — since the spring, it was no eas­ier to­day when these changes be­came real. I des­per­ately wish there was some other way to set Mozilla up for long term suc­cess in build­ing a bet­ter in­ter­net.

But to go fur­ther, we must be or­ga­nized to be able to think about a dif­fer­ent world. To imag­ine that tech­nol­ogy will be­come em­bed­ded in our world even more than it is, and we want that tech­nol­ogy to have dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter­is­tics and val­ues than we ex­pe­ri­ence to­day.

So go­ing for­ward we will be smaller. We’ll also be or­ga­niz­ing our­selves very dif­fer­ently, act­ing more quickly and nim­bly. We’ll ex­per­i­ment more. We’ll ad­just more quickly. We’ll join with al­lies out­side of our or­ga­ni­za­tion more of­ten and more ef­fec­tively. We’ll meet peo­ple where they are. We’ll be­come great at ex­press­ing and build­ing our core val­ues into prod­ucts and pro­grams that speak to to­day’s is­sues. We’ll join and build with all those who seek open­ness, de­cency, em­pow­er­ment and com­mon good in on­line life.

I be­lieve this vi­sion of change will make a dif­fer­ence — that it can al­low us to be­come a Mozilla that ex­cites peo­ple and shapes the agenda of the in­ter­net. I also re­al­ize this vi­sion will feel ab­stract to many. With this in mind, we have mapped out five spe­cific ar­eas to fo­cus on as we roll out this new struc­ture over the com­ing months:

New fo­cus on prod­uct. Mozilla must be a world-class, mod­ern, multi-prod­uct in­ter­net or­ga­ni­za­tion. That means di­verse, rep­re­sen­ta­tive, fo­cused on peo­ple out­side of our walls, solv­ing prob­lems, build­ing new prod­ucts, en­gag­ing with users and do­ing the magic of mix­ing tech with our val­ues. To start, that means prod­ucts that mit­i­gate harms or ad­dress the kinds of the prob­lems that peo­ple face to­day. Over the longer run, our goal is to build new ex­pe­ri­ences that peo­ple love and want, that have bet­ter val­ues and bet­ter char­ac­ter­is­tics in­side those prod­ucts.

New mind­set. The in­ter­net has be­come the plat­form. We love the traits of it — the de­cen­tral­iza­tion, its per­mis­sion­less in­no­va­tion, the open source un­der­pin­nings of it, and the stan­dards part — we love it all. But to en­able these changes, we must shift our col­lec­tive mind­set from a place of de­fend­ing, pro­tect­ing, some­times even hud­dling up and try­ing to keep a piece of what we love to one that is proac­tive, cu­ri­ous, and en­gaged with peo­ple out in the world. We will be­come the mod­ern or­ga­ni­za­tion we aim to be — com­bin­ing prod­uct, tech­nol­ogy and ad­vo­cacy — when we are build­ing new things, mak­ing changes within our­selves and see­ing how the traits of the past can show up in new ways in the fu­ture.

New fo­cus on tech­nol­ogy. Mozilla is a tech­ni­cal pow­er­house of the in­ter­net ac­tivist move­ment. And we must stay that way. We must pro­vide lead­er­ship, test out prod­ucts, and draw busi­nesses into ar­eas that aren’t tra­di­tional web tech­nol­ogy. The in­ter­net is the plat­form now with ubiq­ui­tous web tech­nolo­gies built into it, but vast new ar­eas are de­vel­op­ing (like Wasmtime and the Bytecode Alliance vi­sion of nanoprocesses). Our vi­sion and abil­i­ties should play in those ar­eas too.

New fo­cus on com­mu­nity. Mozilla must con­tinue to be part of some­thing larger than our­selves, part of the group of peo­ple look­ing for a bet­ter in­ter­net. Our open source vol­un­teers to­day — as well as the hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple who do­nate to and par­tic­i­pate in Mozilla Foundation’s ad­vo­cacy work — are a pre­cious and crit­i­cal part of this. But we also need to go fur­ther and think about com­mu­nity in new ways. We must be in­creas­ingly open to join­ing oth­ers on their mis­sions, to con­tribute to the bet­ter in­ter­net they’re build­ing.

New fo­cus on eco­nom­ics. Recognizing that the old model where every­thing was free has con­se­quences, means we must ex­plore a range of dif­fer­ent busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ties and al­ter­nate value ex­changes. How can we lead to­wards busi­ness mod­els that honor and pro­tect peo­ple while cre­at­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties for our busi­ness to thrive? How can we, or oth­ers who want a bet­ter in­ter­net, or those who feel like a dif­fer­ent bal­ance should ex­ist be­tween so­cial and pub­lic ben­e­fit and pri­vate profit of­fer an al­ter­na­tive? We need to iden­tify those peo­ple and join them. We must learn and ex­pand dif­fer­ent ways to sup­port our­selves and build a busi­ness that is­n’t what we see to­day.

We’re for­tu­nate that Firefox and Mozilla re­tain a high de­gree of trust in the world. Trust and a feel­ing of au­then­tic­ity feel un­usual in tech to­day. But there is a sense that peo­ple want more from us. They want to work with us, to build with us. The changes we are mak­ing to­day are hard. But with these changes we be­lieve we’ll be ready to meet these peo­ple — and the chal­lenges and op­por­tu­ni­ties fac­ing the fu­ture of the in­ter­net — head on.

MDN Web Docs is the life blood, the home, the source of truth for mil­lions of web de­vel­op­ers every­day. It em­pow­ers in­di­vid­u­als and teams to build amaz­ing ser­vices and prod­ucts, to learn, to cre­ate their own op­por­tu­ni­ties, and to ex­press them­selves on the open web. As a com­mu­nity of de­vel­op­ers we have ac­cess to all of this in­for­ma­tion for free ♥️

This is all made pos­si­ble by a pas­sion­ate com­mu­nity, in­spi­ra­tional tech­ni­cal writ­ers, and a small, but de­ter­mined team of de­vel­op­ers. It is time that we show them how much we ap­pre­ci­ate their hard work and ded­i­ca­tion. If MDN Web Docs has had an im­pact on your life, please take a mo­ment and leave a com­ment be­low. Thank you! Let’s keep build­ing an Open Web for All!

WebAssembly (wasm) al­lows code writ­ten in lan­guages other than JavaScript to run on browsers. If you haven’t been pay­ing at­ten­tion, all the ma­jor browsers sup­port wasm and glob­ally more than 90% of users have browsers that can run wasm.

Since Rust com­piles to wasm, is it pos­si­ble to build SPAs (Single Page Applications) purely in Rust and with­out writ­ing a sin­gle line of JavaScript? The short an­swer is YES! Read on to learn more or visit the demo site if you can’t con­tain your ex­cite­ment!

We’ll be build­ing a sim­ple ecom­merce site called “RustMart” that will have 2 pages:

HomePage - list all the prod­ucts that the cus­tomer can add to cart

ProductDetailPage - show the prod­uct de­tails when a prod­uct card is clicked

I’m us­ing this ex­am­ple as it tests the min­i­mal set of ca­pa­bil­i­ties re­quired to build mod­ern SPAs:

Update com­po­nents in dif­fer­ent lay­ers of the UI hi­er­ar­chy

Follow this link to in­stall Rust if you haven’t done so al­ready.

$ cargo in­stall wasm-pack # Compile Rust to Wasm and gen­er­ate JS in­terop code

$ cargo in­stall cargo-make # Task run­ner

$ cargo in­stall sim­ple-http-server # Simple server to serve as­sets

$ cargo new –lib rust­mart && cd rust­mart

We’ll be us­ing the Yew li­brary to build UI com­po­nents. Let’s add this and wasm de­pen­den­cies to Cargo.toml:

[lib]

crate-type = [“cdylib”, “rlib”]

[dependencies]

yew = “0.17”

wasm-bind­gen = “0.2”

Create a new file named Makefile.toml and add this:

[tasks.build]

com­mand = “wasm-pack”

args = [“build”, “–dev”, “–target”, “web”, “–out-name”, “wasm”, “–out-dir”, ”./static”]

watch = { ig­nore_­pat­tern = “static/*” }

[tasks.serve]

com­mand = “simple-http-server”

args = [“-i”, ”./static/”, “-p”, “3000″, “–nocache”, “–try-file”, ”./static/index.html”]

$ cargo make build

If you’re new to Rust, I’ve writ­ten some guides for be­gin­ners which will help you fol­low this post bet­ter.

// src/​lib.rs

use was­m_bind­gen::pre­lude::*;

use yew::pre­lude::*;

struct Hello {}

impl Component for Hello {

type Message = ();

type Properties = ();

fn cre­ate(_: Self::Properties, _: ComponentLink) -> Self {

Self {}

fn up­date(&mut self, _: Self::Message) -> ShouldRender {

true

fn change(&mut self, _: Self::Properties) -> ShouldRender {

true

fn view(&self) -> Html {

html! { }

#[wasm_bindgen(start)]

pub fn run_app() {

App::

Lot of things go­ing on but you can see that we’re cre­at­ing a new com­po­nent named “Hello” that ren­ders Hello World! into the DOM. We’ll learn more about Yew com­po­nents later.

Start the serve task in a new ter­mi­nal and load http://​lo­cal­host:3000 in your browser

$ cargo make serve

It works!! It’s only “hello world” but this is fully writ­ten in Rust.

Let’s learn about com­po­nents and other SPA con­cepts be­fore pro­ceed­ing fur­ther.

Building UIs by com­pos­ing com­po­nents and pass­ing data in a uni­di­rec­tional way is a par­a­digm shift in the fron­tend world. It’s a huge im­prove­ment in the way we rea­son about UI and it’s very hard to go back to im­per­a­tive DOM ma­nip­u­la­tion once you get used to this.

A Component in li­braries like React, Vue, Yew, Flutter etc have these fea­tures:

Ability to be com­posed into big­ger com­po­nents

Props - Pass data and call­backs from that com­po­nent to its child com­po­nents.

Listen to life­cy­cle events like “Instantiated”, “Mounted in DOM” etc

A com­po­nent gets up­dated (re-rendered) when one of the fol­low­ing hap­pens:

So, in­stead of im­per­a­tively up­dat­ing the UI when user in­ter­ac­tion, net­work re­quests etc hap­pen, we up­date the data (Props, State, AppState) and the UI is up­dated based on this data. This what some­one means when they say “UI is a func­tion of state”.

The ex­act de­tails dif­fer across dif­fer­ent li­braries but this should give you a gen­eral idea. If you’re new to this, this way of think­ing might take some­time to “click” and get used to.

Let’s build the HomePage first. We’ll be build­ing the HomePage as a mono­lithic com­po­nent and later de­com­pose it into smaller reusable com­po­nents.

// src/​pages/​home.rs

use yew::pre­lude::*;

pub struct Home {}

impl Component for Home {

type Message = ();

type Properties = ();

fn cre­ate(_: Self::Properties, _: ComponentLink) -> Self {

Self {}

fn up­date(&mut self, _: Self::Message) -> ShouldRender {

true

fn change(&mut self, _: Self::Properties) -> ShouldRender {

true

fn view(&self) -> Html {

html! { }

// src/​pages/​mod.rs

mod home;

pub use home::Home;

Let’s up­date the src/​lib.rs to im­port the HomePage com­po­nent:

// src/​lib.rs

+ mod pages;

+ use pages::Home;

use was­m_bind­gen::pre­lude::*;

use yew::pre­lude::*;

- struct Hello {}

- impl Component for Hello {

- type Message = ();

- type Properties = ();

- fn cre­ate(_: Self::Properties, _: ComponentLink) -> Self {

- Self {}

- fn up­date(&mut self, _: Self::Message) -> ShouldRender {

- true

- fn change(&mut self, _: Self::Properties) -> ShouldRender {

- true

- fn view(&self) -> Html {

- html! { }

#[wasm_bindgen(start)]

pub fn run_app() {

- App::

Now, you should see “Home Sweet Home!” in­stead of “Hello World!” ren­dered in your browser.

Let’s start de­sign­ing the State of this com­po­nent:

This process is au­to­matic. Your browser will redi­rect to your re­quested con­tent shortly.

Please al­low up to 5 sec­onds…

We’ve de­tected that JavaScript is dis­abled in your browser. Would you like to pro­ceed to legacy Twitter?

A California judge ruled that Uber and Lyft must clas­sify their dri­vers as em­ploy­ees in a stun­ning pre­lim­i­nary in­junc­tion is­sued Monday af­ter­noon. The in­junc­tion is stayed for 10 days, how­ever, giv­ing Uber and Lyft an op­por­tu­nity to ap­peal the de­ci­sion. Uber said it planned to file an im­me­di­ate emer­gency ap­peal to block the rul­ing from go­ing into ef­fect.

Uber and Lyft are un­der in­creas­ing pres­sure to fun­da­men­tally al­ter their busi­ness mod­els in California, the state where both com­pa­nies were founded and ul­ti­mately pros­pered. At is­sue is the clas­si­fi­ca­tion of ride-hail­ing dri­vers as in­de­pen­dent con­trac­tors. Uber and Lyft say dri­vers pre­fer the flex­i­bil­ity of work­ing as free­lancers, while la­bor unions and elected of­fi­cials con­tend this de­prives them of tra­di­tional ben­e­fits like health in­sur­ance and work­ers’ com­pen­sa­tion.

In May, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, along with city at­tor­neys of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego, sued the com­pa­nies, ar­gu­ing that their dri­vers were mis­clas­si­fied as in­de­pen­dent con­trac­tors when they should be em­ploy­ees un­der the state’s AB5 law that went into ef­fect on January 1st. Becerra later filed a mo­tion for a pre­lim­i­nary in­junc­tion that could com­pel the ride-hail­ing com­pa­nies to clas­sify dri­vers as em­ploy­ees im­me­di­ately. AB5, which was signed into law last September, en­shrines the so-called “ABC test” to de­ter­mine if some­one is a con­trac­tor or an em­ployee.

“It’s this sim­ple,” California Superior Court Judge Ethan Schulman wrote in his rul­ing, “Defendants’ dri­vers do not per­form work that is ‘outside the usual course’ of their busi­ness. Defendants’ in­sis­tence that their busi­nesses are ‘multi-sided plat­forms’ rather than trans­porta­tion com­pa­nies is flatly in­con­sis­tent with the statu­tory pro­vi­sions that gov­ern their busi­nesses as trans­porta­tion net­work com­pa­nies, which are de­fined as com­pa­nies that ‘engage in the trans­porta­tion of per­sons by mo­tor ve­hi­cle for com­pen­sa­tion.’”

He added, “It also flies in the face of eco­nomic re­al­ity and com­mon sense… To state the ob­vi­ous, dri­vers are cen­tral, not tan­gen­tial, to Uber and Lyft’s en­tire ride-hail­ing busi­ness.”

In a state­ment hail­ing the rul­ing, Becerra said California and its work­ers “shouldn’t have to foot the bill when big busi­nesses try to skip out on their re­spon­si­bil­i­ties. We’re go­ing to keep work­ing to make sure Uber and Lyft play by the rules.”

This was just the lat­est le­gal blow against Uber and Lyft in California. Last week, the state’s la­bor com­mis­sioner al­leged in a pair of law­suits that the com­pa­nies were steal­ing wages from dri­vers by re­fus­ing to clas­sify them as em­ploy­ees.

Drivers’ groups that have been pres­sur­ing the com­pa­nies to re­clas­sify their dri­vers cel­e­brated the de­ci­sion as for­ward progress. “Today’s rul­ing af­firms what California dri­vers have long known to be true,” Mike Robinson, a Lyft dri­ver and mem­ber of the Mobile Workers Alliance, a group of Southern California dri­vers, said in a state­ment, “workers like me have rights and Uber and Lyft must re­spect those rights.”

But Uber and Lyft main­tain this rul­ing con­flicts with the de­sires of the ma­jor­ity of dri­vers and will re­sult in fewer jobs dur­ing a global pan­demic that is putting strain on work­ers’ fi­nances.

“The vast ma­jor­ity of dri­vers want to work in­de­pen­dently, and we’ve al­ready made sig­nif­i­cant changes to our app to en­sure that re­mains the case un­der California law,” an Uber spokesper­son said. “When over 3 mil­lion Californians are with­out a job, our elected lead­ers should be fo­cused on cre­at­ing work, not try­ing to shut down an en­tire in­dus­try dur­ing an eco­nomic de­pres­sion.”

A Lyft spokesper­son agreed. “Drivers do not want to be em­ploy­ees, full stop,” the spokesper­son said. “We’ll im­me­di­ately ap­peal this rul­ing and con­tinue to fight for their in­de­pen­dence. Ultimately, we be­lieve this is­sue will be de­cided by California vot­ers and that they will side with dri­vers.”

If dri­vers were clas­si­fied as em­ploy­ees, Uber and Lyft would be re­spon­si­ble for pay­ing them min­i­mum wage, over­time com­pen­sa­tion, paid rest pe­ri­ods, and re­im­burse­ments for the cost of dri­ving for the com­pa­nies, in­clud­ing per­sonal ve­hi­cle mileage. But as in­de­pen­dent con­trac­tors, dri­vers re­ceive none of these ben­e­fits.

The flurry of law­suits and court rul­ings in California comes ahead of the November elec­tion, when the state’s vot­ers will de­cide on an Uber-and-Lyft-backed bal­lot mea­sure that would over­ride AB5 by clas­si­fy­ing ride-hail dri­vers and other gig econ­omy work­ers as in­de­pen­dent con­trac­tors.

Prepear is a meal plan­ner and gro­cery list app that helps peo­ple dis­cover recipes and more. It’s a spin off from the founders of Super Healthy Kids and right now they say­ing its logo is un­der le­gal at­tack from Apple.

It’s funny what Instagram ac­counts you fol­low as a par­ent at some point. Yesterday, we no­ticed Super Healthy Kids shar­ing a post de­tail­ing their new le­gal woes with Apple.

According to the founders, Apple “has op­posed the trade­mark ap­pli­ca­tion for our small busi­ness, Prepear, de­mand­ing that we change our ob­vi­ously pear shaped logo, used to rep­re­sent our brand in the recipe man­age­ment and meal plan­ning busi­ness.”

In a pe­ti­tion on Change.org, Prepear goes on to say, “before at­tack­ing us, Apple has op­posed dozens of other trade­mark ap­pli­ca­tions filed by small busi­nesses with fruit re­lated lo­gos. Many of those lo­gos were changed or aban­doned. Most small busi­nesses can­not af­ford the tens of thou­sands of dol­lars it would cost to fight Apple.”

Prepear says they are a small com­pany with only five staff and le­gal costs have al­ready cost them “many thou­sands of dol­lars” plus lay­ing off one team mem­ber, in their le­gal fight against the iPhone maker.

“It is a very ter­ri­fy­ing ex­pe­ri­ence to be legally at­tacked by one of the largest com­pa­nies in the world, even when we have clearly done noth­ing wrong, and we un­der­stand why most com­pa­nies just give in and change their lo­gos,” adds Prepear in its plea for sup­port.

Prepear says they “feel a moral oblig­a­tion to take a stand against Apple’s ag­gres­sive le­gal ac­tion against small busi­nesses and fight for the right to keep our logo. We are de­fend­ing our­selves against Apple not only to keep our logo, but to send a mes­sage to big tech com­pa­nies that bul­ly­ing small busi­nesses has con­se­quences.”

So far, just over 8,200 sig­na­tures have been signed out of a goal of 10,000 on change.org.

Looking at the two lo­gos above, I can’t say the Prepear logo re­sem­bles the Apple logo at all. But of course, Apple feels dif­fer­ent about that.

Prepear is a free app and avail­able for down­load on iOS and Android.

Update: You can check out Apple’s trade­mark op­po­si­tion filed above (via MacRumors).

Update August 9: Prepear’s COO, Russ Monson, told iPhone in Canada in an email more in­sight in re­gards to the com­pa­ny’s fil­ing of their trade­mark for the ‘pear’ logo.

Monson says Prepear filed their trade­mark for the logo back in January 2017 and even­tu­ally was told by the U. S. Trademark of­fice “that it was not in con­flict with any other reg­is­tered trade­marks and that they would pub­lish it for op­po­si­tion.” Everything seemed good to go.

That was un­til on the “on the last day of the win­dow to op­pose the trade­mark we re­ceived no­tice that Apple had filed for an ex­ten­sion of the win­dow to op­pose, and they sub­se­quently filed for ad­di­tional ex­ten­sions which put our trade­mark in le­gal limbo for an ex­tended pe­riod of time.”

According to Monson, Apple filed their ac­tual op­po­si­tion on the fi­nal day they were legally al­lowed. Subsequent ex­ten­sions filed re­sult in more le­gal fees for a com­pany like Prepear to take on, which they said “seemed de­signed by their le­gal team to be made as long, dif­fi­cult, and ex­pen­sive as pos­si­ble for us.”

Monson goes on to ex­plain Prepear was “naive enough” to think they could dis­cuss the mat­ter with Apple ra­tio­nally, as both lo­gos look dif­fer­ent. But that was­n’t the case and the op­po­si­tion has reached the ‘discovery phase’, which the COO says will “be the most ex­pen­sive part of this case for us.”

After Apple filed to pro­ceed to dis­cov­ery phase, that’s what Prepear de­cided to start their pe­ti­tion. “We be­lieve that this case is clearly friv­o­lous, and that once the pub­lic is aware of Apple’s po­si­tion on this that Apple will be more will­ing to drop the case rather than have the pub­lic see how they are clearly harm­ing us for no ap­par­ent jus­ti­fi­able rea­son,” said Monson to iPhone in Canada.

Prepear says they aren’t ask­ing for a boy­cott of Apple prod­ucts, but they are ask­ing the iPhone maker to “stop at­tack­ing small busi­nesses like ours in friv­o­lous cases that seem de­signed to cause us to spend as much money and time think­ing about the case in­stead of fo­cus­ing on how to grow our busi­ness and en­sure we sur­vive the cur­rent eco­nomic cri­sis.”

Monson shared with iPhone in Canada some other op­po­si­tions Apple had pre­vi­ously filed against, in a sim­i­lar fash­ion to what is hap­pen­ing them right now. These com­pa­nies be­low gave up when Apple reached out, but Prepear says they are lucky to gar­ner enough me­dia at­ten­tion “to ex­pose this prac­tice by Apple.”

Prepear says it will be hand­ing its pe­ti­tion of sig­na­tures–which cur­rently stands at nearly 19,000 sig­na­tures–to Apple soon and will be shar­ing up­dates on what hap­pens. The com­pany ex­plains to iPhone in Canada it hopes Apple will drop the case be­fore it gets to more ex­pen­sive dis­cov­ery and trial phases.