Google says it will scan the extensions users install in their Chrome browsers and warn users if they are adding an extension from a new or untrusted developer. From a report: The new extension scanning feature will be part of a Google security feature called Enhanced Safe Browsing, which Google added to Chrome in May last year. Google says trusted developers are those who adhere to the Chrome Web Store Developer Program Policies. "For new developers, it will take at least a few months of respecting these conditions to become trusted," the browser maker said in a blog post today. Currently, Google said that almost 75% of all extensions hosted on the Chrome Web Store were developed by "trusted developers." For the rest, the browser will show an alert like the one below if users had enabled Enhanced Safe Browsing in their Chrome settings page.

Prosus said it struck a $1.8 billion deal to acquire Stack Overflow, an online community for software developers, in a bet on growing demand for online tech learning. From a report: Based in New York, closely held Stack Overflow operates a question-and-answer website used by software developers and other types of workers such as financial professionals and marketers who increasingly need coding skills. It attracts more than 100 million visitors monthly, the company says.

Prosus, one of Europe's most valuable tech companies, is best known as the largest shareholder in Chinese internet and videogaming giant Tencent Holdings Listed in Amsterdam, Prosus signaled its appetite for deal making when it sold a small portion of its equity stake in Tencent in April for $14.6 billion. The Stack Overflow deal ranks among Prosus' biggest acquisitions. Prosus invests globally across a range of online platforms focused on areas such as food delivery, classifieds and fintech. It also maintains a more than $200 billion holding in Tencent. Prosus' parent company, Naspers, acquired the Tencent stake in 2001 for $34 million. Official press release.

"To help realize the possibility of carbon-free applications, Microsoft, the consultancies Accenture and ThoughtWorks, the Linux Foundation, and Microsoft-owned code-sharing site, GitHub, have launched The Green Software Foundation," reports ZDNet: Announced at Microsoft's Build 2021 developer conference, the foundation is trying to promote the idea of green software engineering - a new field that looks to make code more efficient and reduce carbon emitted from the hardware it's running on... The foundation wants to set standards, best practices and patterns for building green software; nurture the creation of trusted open-source and open-data projects and support academic research; and grow an international community of green software ambassadors. The goal is to help the Information and Communication Technology sector to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 45% before 2030.

That includes mobile network operators, ISPs, data centers, and all the laptops being snapped up during the pandemic. "We envision a future where carbon-free software is standard - where software development, deployment, and use contribute to the global climate solution without every developer having to be an expert," Erica Brescia, COO of GitHub said in a statement. Microsoft president Brad Smith said "the world confronts an urgent carbon problem."

"It will take all of us working together to create innovative solutions to drastically reduce emissions. Microsoft is joining with organizations who are serious about an environmentally sustainable future to drive adoption of green software development to help our customers and partners around the world reduce their carbon footprint."
VentureBeat also points out that Microsoft "recently launched a $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund to accelerate the global development of carbon reduction, capture, and removal technologies."

But Bloomberg explores the rationale behind the new foundation: Data centers now account for about 1% of global electricity demand, and that's forecast to rise to 3% to 8% in the next decade, the companies said in a statement Tuesday, timed to Microsoft's Build developers conference... While it's tough to determine exactly how much carbon is emitted by individual software programs, groups like the Green Software Foundation examine metrics such as how much electricity is needed, whether microprocessors are being used efficiently, and the carbon emitted in networking. The foundation plans to look at curricula and developing certifications that would give engineers expertise in this space. As with areas like data science and cybersecurity, there will be an opportunity for engineers to specialize in green software development, but everyone who builds software will need at least some background in it, said Jeff Sandquist, a Microsoft vice president for developer relations.

"This will be the responsibility of everybody on the development team, much like when we look at security, or performance or reliability," he said. "Building the application in a sustainable way is going to matter."

"Microsoft has announced general availability of the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK, the open-source version of the Java development kit," reports ZDNet: The release follows the April preview of the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK, a long-term support distribution of OpenJDK... Microsoft announced general availability for the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK at its Build 2021 conference for developers.

Microsoft is a major user of Java in Azure, SQL Server, Yammer, Minecraft, and LinkedIn, but it's only been supporting Java in Visual Studio Code tooling for the past five years. "We've deployed our own version of OpenJDK on hundreds of thousands of virtual machines inside Microsoft and LinkedIn," Julia Liuson, corporate vice president of Microsoft's developer division, told ZDNet. "Across the board Microsoft has over 500,000 VMs running Java at Microsoft. We're also providing that to customers as well for Azure...."

"We believe Microsoft is uniquely positioned to be a partner in the language community. We can do a lot of direct contribution to the JDK community and we do world-class tooling, which is VS Code." Microsoft's contributions to OpenJDK — an open-source JDK for the most popular Linux distributions — includes work on the garbage collector and writing capabilities for the Java runtime.

The Microsoft Build of OpenJDK is available for free to deploy in qualifying Azure support plans. It includes binaries for Java 11 based on OpenJDK 11.0.11, on x64 server, and desktop environments on macOS, Linux and Windows, according to Microsoft...
Its download page at Microsoft.com touts it as "Free. Open Source. Freshly Brewed!"

And they describe it as "a new no-cost long-term supported distribution and Microsoft's new way to collaborate and contribute to the Java ecosystem."

Slashdot reader AleRunner writes: Ubuntu has announced that, with immediate effect Ubuntu's IRC channels are moving to libera.chat. The move follows a "hostile takeover" of Ubuntu's namespace by Freenode's new management that appears to be happening to many other distributions including Gentoo as well as other projects that have used Freenode [including channels associated with the programming languages Raku, Elixir, and Haskell].

For Ubuntu, and many other FOSS projects, Freenode has long been one of the major official forms of communication... With IRC channels often used for important system advice, and project communication, this becomes not just an inconvenience but even a security problem. For this reason Ubuntu's replacement network, libera.chat has a more clearly open organisational structure than Freenode had before being taken over.
"All told, it appears something like 700 irc.freenode.net channels have been seized and re-permissioned," reports The Register, "supposedly because the channels mentioned Libera Chat in violation of Freenode's advertising policy."

Wednesday Freenode owner Andrew Lee posted a blog post explaining that "in retrospect, we should have handled the action of closing down channels slightly differently..."

"The intent of doing this was not an attempt of a hostile takeover nor hijack like many people are saying. Since certain projects were disrupting their users' ability to chat on freenode via mass kicks, force closures, spam, we decided to enact this policy in those places which were deemed in violation and could cause an issue later...

"We believe we should have done this in a much more communicative way to circulate the right message and keep things transparent which of course did not happen. As we move forward I'd like to fully assure you that we will be working in complete commitment to restore projects, namespaces and channels that were closed on accident as a part of this event and we welcome them to use freenode as before as their very own homebase.

"Lastly, there are no excuses for this, and I'm willing to admit that I was wrong with Tuesday's move and apologize for the inconvenience that may have caused."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: On Tuesday, Microsoft and OpenAI shared plans to bring GPT-3, one of the world's most advanced models for generating text, to programming based on natural language descriptions. This is the first commercial application of GPT-3 undertaken since Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI last year and gained exclusive licensing rights to GPT-3. "If you can describe what you want to do in natural language, GPT-3 will generate a list of the most relevant formulas for you to choose from," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a keynote address at the company's Build developer conference. "The code writes itself."

Microsoft VP Charles Lamanna told WIRED the sophistication offered by GPT-3 can help people tackle complex challenges and empower people with little coding experience. GPT-3 will translate natural language into PowerFx, a fairly simple programming language similar to Excel commands that Microsoft introduced in March. Microsoft's new feature is based on a neural network architecture known as Transformer, used by big tech companies including Baidu, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Salesforce to create large language models using text training data scraped from the web. These language models continually grow larger. The largest version of Google's BERT, a language model released in 2018, had 340 million parameters, a building block of neural networks. GPT-3, which was released one year ago, has 175 billion parameters. Such efforts have a long way to go, however. In one recent test, the best model succeeded only 14 percent of the time on introductory programming challenges compiled by a group of AI researchers. Still, researchers who conducted that study conclude that tests prove that "machine learning models are beginning to learn how to code."

After years of work, Epic Games is launching early access for game developers for Unreal Engine 5, the latest version of the company's tools for making games with highly realistic 3D animations. VentureBeat reports: Unreal Engine 5, which will officially ship in 2022, is the company's crowning technical achievement. The early access build will let game developers start testing features and prototyping their upcoming games. Epic isn't saying how long this took or how many employees are working on it, but it's a safe bet that a large chunk of those devs are involved in Unreal Engine 5. It's been seven years since the last engine shipped. Unreal Engine 5 will deliver the freedom, fidelity, and flexibility to create next-generation games that will blow players' minds, said Nick Penwarden, the vice president of engineering, in an interview with GamesBeat. He said it will be effortless for game developers to use groundbreaking new features such as Nanite and Lumen, which provide a generational leap in visual fidelity. The new World Partition system enables the creation of expansive worlds with scalable content.

Developers can also download the new sample project, Valley of the Ancient, to start exploring the new features of UE5. Captured on an Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, Valley of the Ancient is a rich and practical example of how the new features included with Unreal Engine 5 early access can be used, and is the result of internal stress-testing. The demo features a woman named Echo in a deserted mountain area. The team from Quixel, which Epic acquired in 2019, went out to Moab in Utah to scan tons of rock formations, using drones and cameras. And the artists who created the demo populated the scene with Megascans assets, as opposed to using anything procedural or traditional animation tools. "We are targeting 30FPS on next-generation console hardware" at 4K output with the demo, said Penwarden. "We expect people to be targeting 60 frames per second. It's really a choice of the the gaming content itself, what you want to target, and UE5 is absolutely capable of powering 60 frames per second experiences. We chose to, in this case, absolutely maximize visual quality. And so we targeted 30fps. But we're absolutely going to support 60 frames per second experiences."

You can view a demo of Unreal Engine 5 running on both the PS5 and Xbox Series X here on YouTube.

App developer and scam app hunter Kosta Eleftheriou's latest discovery is a real doozy: an iOS app that refuses to function until you give it at least a 3-star review in the App Store. From a report: Although the UPNP Xtreme app -- which claimed to let users stream video to their TVs -- now appears to have been pulled, we were able to verify that it generates the App Store rating box the second it opens. You can't dismiss the ratings box, nor can you tap the 1 or 2-star ratings, Eleftheriou said. We verified this behavior, but some other users report they were able to dismiss the dialog box or leave a lower rating.

Oracle is giving customers more choice and flexibility with the launch of its first Arm-based cloud compute offering on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform. From a report: The new offering, called OCI Ampere A1 Compute, is designed to power both general-purpose and cloud-native workloads that demand high performance at more manageable costs, Oracle said today. It's based on the Ampere Altra architecture built by Ampere Computing. Today's announcement comes as Oracle makes a big investment into the Arm ecosystem more generally, with the availability of more resources and tools, including a new development environment for developers that's intended to support Arm-based application development.

Arm's central processing units are known for their extremely efficient, flexible and scalable architecture. They're most prominently used in smaller devices such as smartphones, but in more recent years they have come to power everything from personal computers and "internet of things" devices to computer servers and even supercomputers. Oracle said its new Arm compute instances come in a range of options and sizes to fit just about any workload, with choices including what it says are the industry's first Arm-based flexible virtual machine shapes that can be right-sized for different jobs. There are also more powerful bare metal server options.

Microsoft is now using OpenAI's massive GPT-3 natural language model in its no-code/low-code Power Apps service to translate spoken text into code in its recently announced Power Fx language. From a report: Now don't get carried away. You're not going to develop the next TikTok while only using natural language. Instead, what Microsoft is doing here is taking some of the low-code aspects of a tool like Power Apps and using AI to essentially turn those into no-code experiences, too. For now, the focus here is on Power Apps formulas, which despite the low-code nature of the service, is something you'll have to write sooner or later if you want to build an app of any sophistication.

"Using an advanced AI model like this can help our low-code tools become even more widely available to an even bigger audience by truly becoming what we call no code," said Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president for Microsoft's low-code application platform. In practice, this looks like the citizen programmer writing "find products where the name starts with 'kids'" -- and Power Apps then rendering that as "Filter('BC Orders' Left('Product Name',4)="Kids")". Because Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI, it's no surprise the company chose its model to power this experience.

Microsoft has teamed up with Qualcomm to create a Windows on ARM-based dev kit for developers. From a report: The miniature PC will be sold at the Microsoft Store this summer, and is designed to be more affordable to encourage developers to create ARM64 apps for Snapdragon-based PCs. Until now, developers have had to purchase devices like the Surface Pro X to fully test their ARM64 apps on Windows. That's a costly exercise for developers, particularly when the Surface Pro X retails from $999 and up. While Microsoft and Qualcomm haven't put a price on this new dev kit, there are promises it will be more affordable than what developers can buy today. "This developer kit provides an affordable alternative to other consumer and commercial devices," says Miguel Nunes, senior director of product management at Qualcomm. "With the smaller desktop configuration, this kit gives developers more flexibility than notebook options, and at a lower price point."

Python's creator Guido van Rossum shared his opinions on other programming languages during a new hour-long interview with Microsoft's principle cloud advocate manager. Some of the highlights:

• Rust: "It sounds like it's a great language — for certain things. Rust really improves on C++ in one particular area — it makes it much harder to bypass the checks in the compiler. And of course it solves the memory allocation problem in a near perfect way... if you wrote the same thing in C++, you could not be as sure, as compared to Rust, that you've gotten all your memory allocation and memory management stuff right. So Rust is an interesting language."

• Go and Julia: "I still think that Go is a very interesting language too. Of all the new languages, Go is probably the most Python-ic — or at least the general-purpose new languages. There's also Julia, which is sort of an interesting sort of take on something Python-like. It has enough details that look very similar to Python that then when you realize, 'Oh, but all the indexing is one-based and ranges are inclusive instead of exclusive,' you think, 'Argh!' Nobody should ever try to code in Julia and in Python on the same day.
  
  "My understanding is that Julia is sort of much more of a niche language, and if you're in that niche, it is superior because the compiler optimizes your code for you in a way that Python probably never will. On the other hand, it is much more limited in other areas, and I wouldn't expect that anybody ever is going to write a web server in Julia and get a lot of mileage out of it. And I'm sure in five minutes that will be on Hacker News with a counterexample."

• TypeScript: "TypeScript is a great language. You might have noticed that in the past six or seven years, we've been adding optional static typing to Python, also known as gradual typing. I wasn't actually aware of TypeScript when we started that project, so I can't say that we were inspired by TypeScript initially. TypeScript, because it sort of jumped on the JavaScript bandwagon — and because Anders is a really smart guy — TypeScript did a few things that Python is still waiting to figure out. So nowadays, we definitely look at TypeScript for examples. We have a typing SIG where we discuss extensions of the typing syntax and semantics and the type system in general for Python, and we definitely sometimes propose new features because we know that certain features were also originally initially lacking in TypeScript, and then added to TypeScript based on user demand, and [became] very successful in TypeScript. And so now we can see we are in that same situation.
  
  "Because JavaScript and Python are relatively similar... Much more so than Python and say C++ or Rust or Java. So we are learning from TypeScript, and occasionally, from my conversations with Anders, it sounds like TypeScript is also learning from Python, just like JavaScript has learned from Python in a few areas."

"The official Python software package repository, PyPI, is getting flooded with spam packages..." Bleeping Computer reported Thursday.

"Each of these packages is posted by a unique pseudonymous maintainer account, making it challenging for PyPI to remove the packages and spam accounts all at once..." PyPI is being flooded with spam packages named after popular movies in a style commonly associated with torrent or "warez" sites that provide pirated downloads: watch-(movie-name)-2021-full-online-movie-free-hd-... Although some of these packages are a few weeks old, BleepingComputer observed that spammers are continuing to add newer packages to PyPI... The web page for these bogus packages contain spam keywords and links to movie streaming sites, albeit of questionable legitimacy and legality...

February of this year, PyPI had been flooded with bogus "Discord", "Google", and "Roblox" keygens in a massive spam attack, as reported by ZDNet. At the time, Ewa Jodlowska, Executive Director of the Python Software Foundation had told ZDNet that the PyPI admins were working on addressing the spam attack, however, by the nature of pypi.org, anyone could publish to the repository, and such occurrences were common.

Other than containing spam keywords and links to quasi-video streaming sites, these packages contain files with functional code and author information lifted from legitimate PyPI packages... As previously reported by BleepingComputer, malicious actors have combined code from legitimate packages with otherwise bogus or malicious packages to mask their footsteps, and make the detection of these packages a tad more challenging...

In recent months, the attacks on open-source ecosystems like npm, RubyGems, and PyPI have escalated. Threat actors have been caught flooding software repositories with malware, malicious dependency confusion copycats, or simply vigilante packages to spread their message. As such, securing these repositories has turned into a whack-a-mole race between threat actors and repository maintainers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Mercury News: Instead of learning a foreign language, Michigan students could take computer coding classes to replace the high school graduation requirement, under a bill that passed the state House Tuesday. Currently, the Michigan Merit Curriculum, which dictates the state's academic standards for graduation, requires students to take two world language credits to receive a high school diploma. Before the bill passed a vote, bill sponsor Rep. Greg VanWoerkom spoke about the value of coding in Michigan's prominent auto and tech industries, as well as it being a good alternative for those kids who struggle with traditional language classes.

"Besides being a hard skill, that employers actually want, coding. helps build soft skills. Coding promotes the use of logic, reasoning, problem solving and creativity," the Norton Shores Republican said. "Any professional coder will tell you that to be fluent in coding takes years of practice and a deep understanding of the language." In opposition to the bill, Rep Padma Kuppa said though she understands the importance of adding more technology education to curriculums, having had a career as a mechanical engineer, coding is not a foreign language. Students need both computer and tech skills and foreign language skills. "As technology helps the world become more interconnected, our ability to understand and work with others on technical projects around the globe is not only related to the ability to code, but to understand one another," the Troy Democrat said.

ZDNet reports: Guido van Rossum, who created popular programming language Python 30 years ago, has outlined his ambitions to make it twice as fast — addressing a key weakness of Python compared to faster languages like C++.

Speed in Core Python (CPython) is one of the reasons why other implementations have emerged, such as Pyston.... In a contribution to the U.S. PyCon Language Summit this week, van Rossum posted a document on Microsoft-owned GitHub, first spotted by The Register, detailing some of his ambitions to make Python a faster language, promising to double its speed in Python 3.11 — one of three Python branches that will emerge next year in a pre-alpha release... van Rossum was "given freedom to pick a project" at Microsoft and adds that he "chose to go back to my roots".

"This is Microsoft's way of giving back to Python," writes van Rossum... According to van Rossum, Microsoft has funded a small Python team to "take charge of performance improvements" in the interpreted language...

He says that the main beneficiaries of upcoming changes to Python will be those running "CPU-intensive pure Python code" and users of websites with built-in Python.
The Register notes that the faster CPython project "has a GitHub repository which includes a fork of CPython as well as an issue tracker for ideas and tools for analysing performance."

"According to Van Rossum, there will be 'no long-lived forks/branches, no surprise 6,000 line pull requests,' and everything will be open source."

Apple is swatting down criticisms about how it runs its App Store, arguing its policies are just like those of its peers, in a new letter to senators today. From a report: Apple is making similar arguments to Congress to the ones in its defense in the Epic Games lawsuit -- namely, that it has the right to run its marketplace as it sees fit, and that companies and consumers that don't like it have alternatives. The letter, addressed to the members of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee that held a contentious hearing on app stores last month, contends that Spotify, Tile and Match Group misstated Apple's policies and are actually examples of companies that have been successful on iOS.

"Rather than demonstrating a problem with competition, these witnesses -- representing companies that have thrived in Apple's ecosystem -- showcased how Apple and the iOS ecosystem foster competition," wrpte Apple chief compliance officer Kyle Andeer, in the letter to Congress. At points, Apple appears to overstate its case. In one part, it writes that Spotify is wrong to suggest that developers can't communicate with customers about alternate purchase options, saying "Apple simply says that developers cannot redirect customers who are in the App Store to leave the App Store and go elsewhere." However, this restriction doesn't just apply in the App Store, but anywhere within an iOS app.

AmiMoJo writes: Zoom, a hallmark platform used by millions during the global health crisis, has been given access to a special iPadOS API that allows the app to use the iPad camera while the app is in use in Split View multitasking mode. This case of special treatment was first brought to attention by app developer Jeremy Provost, who, in a blog post, explains that Zoom uses a special API that allows the app to continue using and accessing the iPad camera while the app is being used in Split View mode. Zoom can do this thanks to an "entitlement," which grants developers the ability to execute a particular capability with an API. As Provost notes, Apple publicly documents the ability for developers to apply for several different entitlements, such as ones related to CarPlay, HomeKit, and more. However, the special API that Zoom has been given is not offered to other developers by Apple, nor is its existence acknowledged by the company itself. On the Zoom Developer Forum, a staff member for the video conferencing platform had confirmed earlier in February that Zoom has access to the "com.apple.developer.avfoundation.multitasking-camera-access," or iPad Camera Multitasking entitlement. Further reading: Apple Offered Special App Store API Access To Hulu and Other Developers.

IBM announced during its Think 2021 conference on Monday that its researchers have crafted a Rosetta Stone for programming code. Engadget reports: In effect, we've taught computers how to speak human, so why not also teach computers to speak more computer? That's what IBM's Project CodeNet seeks to accomplish. "We need our ImageNet, which can snowball the innovation and can unleash this innovation in algorithms," [Ruchir Puri, IBM Fellow and Chief Scientist at IBM Research, said during his Think 2021 presentation]. CodeNet is essentially the ImageNet of computers. It's an expansive dataset designed to teach AI/ML systems how to translate code and consists of some 14 million snippets and 500 million lines spread across more than 55 legacy and active languages -- from COBOL and FORTRAN to Java, C++, and Python.

"Since the data set itself contains 50 different languages, it can actually enable algorithms for many pairwise combinations," Puri explained. "Having said that, there has been work done in human language areas, like neural machine translation which, rather than doing pairwise, actually becomes more language-independent and can derive an intermediate abstraction through which it translates into many different languages." In short, the dataset is constructed in a manner that enables bidirectional translation. That is, you can take some legacy COBOL code -- which, terrifyingly, still constitutes a significant amount of this country's banking and federal government infrastructure -- and translate it into Java as easily as you could take a snippet of Java and regress it back into COBOL.

CodeNet can be used for functions like code search and clone detection, in addition to its intended translational duties and serving as a benchmark dataset. Also, each sample is labeled with its CPU run time and memory footprint, allowing researchers to run regression studies and potentially develop automated code correction systems. Project CodeNet consists of more than 14 million code samples along with 4000-plus coding problems collected and curated from decades' of programming challenges and competitions across the globe. "The way the data set actually came about," Puri said, "there are many kinds of programming competitions and all kinds of problems -- some of them more businesslike, some of them more academic. These are the languages that have been used over the last decade and a half in many of these competitions with 1000s of students or competitors submitting solutions." Additionally, users can run individual code samples "to extract metadata and verify outputs from generative AI models for correctness," according to an IBM press release. "This will enable researchers to program intent equivalence when translating one programming language into another." [...] IBM intends to release the CodeNet data to the public domain, allowing researchers worldwide equal and free access.

Developers are sharing their salaries on Twitter under the hashtag #GameDevPaidMe to encourage pay transparency in their industry. Axios reports: The hashtag started circulating last year, but has returned periodically as developers fight for better working conditions. Salary sharing is a way to equalize the field. By removing the secrecy, as well as the stigma, around discussing pay, workers have more power to advocate for themselves when negotiating salaries and raises. In 2020, Blizzard employees shared their salaries anonymously via a spreadsheet to compare compensation. The pay gap between people at the top, and workers on the ground is measurable in hundreds of thousands of dollars -- even when those CEOs take pay cuts.

What they're saying:
A lead designer on "Hearthstone" working for Blizzard Entertainment: "I started getting paid fairly once I started asking questions. I only started asking questions once I better understood what I was worth. Understanding what your worth can be a difficult question, but this helps."

A lead designer at Blackbird Interactive: "Every single person who plays games should take a good look at #GameDevPaidMe and get a sense for what the people who make your art actually make."

A senior game designer at Reflector Entertainment: "Don't wait for your employer to give you the raise you deserve, be open to talking to other companies even if you feel you are at a 'great' spot."

App Store Vice President Matt Fischer is on the stand answering questions from Apple and Epic lawyers, and one of the emails shared as evidence confirms that Apple has established special deals with major app developers like Hulu. From a report: In 2018, a tweet from developer David Barnard commented about App Store subscriptions being automatically cancelled through the StoreKit API, questioning why there hadn't been more offers to swap billing away from the App Store. Matt Fischer asked Cindy Lin about it, and she explained that Hulu is a developer with special access to a subscription cancel/refund API. Hulu is part of the set of whitelisted developers with access to subscription cancel/refund API. Back in 2015 they were using this to support instant upgrade using a 2 family setup, before we had subscription upgrade/downgrade capabilities built in. Apple does not further detail who other developers with special access might have been in the correspondence, but these are not features that all developers have access to. Apple has long said that the App Store provides a "level playing field" that treats all apps in the App Store the same with one set of rules for everybody and no special deals or special terms, but it's clear that some apps are indeed provided with special privileges.