Welcome to the Tech Beam Ride Home for Thursday, September 24th, 2020.

I'm Brian McCullough today.

The Rebel Alliance has a name, the Coalition for App Fairness.

Microsoft will make Office available without a subscription,

software as a purchase, if you will.

Say hello to the Galaxy S20 FE and does the gaming industry make pre-orders and console

launches so messy on purpose?

Here's what you miss today in the world of Tech.

It looks like an official Rebel Alliance is forming, headed by Epic and Spotify, an alliance

that is officially being called The Coalition for App Fairness, which claims, quote,

Apple taxes consumers and crushes innovation, and that this new coalition will advocate, quote,

for freedom of choice and fair competition

across the app ecosystem, end quote.

Epic and Spotify are the leaders, as I said,

but they're joined by Match Group, Bas Camp, Deezer, Prepare, Proton Mail, and

Tyle among several others. So basically, anyone who we've ever talked about having an official beef

with Apple is in there, but the coalition is not just

going against Apple, of course, their guns are trained on the Google Play Store as well.

And broadly, just the group wants to push for new regulations around how

App Stores in general are run, quoting and gadget. The coalition will allow those

companies to pool resources and lobby as a group while giving clout to smaller developers who could never

tackle giants like Apple or Google alone.

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