but you pay for the distribution / tools / OS etc is a common sentiment I see here. No, the yearly fee should pay for that, and the user for the OS. And anyways, what if I don't want to, why cant I distribute it myself?
> but you pay for the distribution / tools / OS etc is a common sentiment I see here. No, the yearly fee should pay for that, and the user for the OS. And anyways, what if I don't want to, why cant I distribute it myself?
And if you choose to distribute your apps yourself? Apple still requires you to pay the $100 a year Apple tax, otherwise macOS will treat your app as if it is radioactive[1], leaving users to think that your app is either broken or malicious.
Apple has gone one step further, and now macOS on ARM Macs requires signed binaries, and it will not run unsigned ones[1][2].
> Apple has gone one step further, and now macOS on ARM Macs requires signed binaries, and it will not run unsigned ones.
Apple Silicon Macs will not run unsigned binaries, but the binaries can have any signature, so you can just generate one yourself and add it. There's no need for a developer account, or any other external party. And there are no issues with legacy support either, because ARM Mac binaries didn't exist until now (and the requirement does not apply to Intel apps being run via Rosetta).
This really isn't a big deal.
I was initially worried that mandatory code signing would prevent me from hex editing binaries (which is a thing I do sometimes), but I recently learned that codesign can replace a binary's existing signature. So even that shouldn't be a problem.
> They will not run unsigned binaries, but the binaries can have any signature, so you can just generate one yourself and add it. No need for a developer account, or any other external server or party. And there's no issues with legacy support because ARM Mac binaries didn't exist before now (and the requirement does not apply to Intel apps being run via Rosetta).
Self-signed applications are treated as if they're radioactive by macOS, too.
> This really isn't a big deal.
They've been turning the screws slowly over the last two years. It only takes another turn for them to switch off support for self-signed apps for security reasons. Browsers already do this for self-signed certificates.
It's just not something I'm willing to base my purchasing decisions on, nor the decisions about what desktop platforms I target with my applications.
> Self-signed applications are treated as if they're radioactive by macOS, too.
But not if you turn off Gatekeeper! I can understand how this is annoying if you're creating apps for other people, but in terms of my own personal experience with my computer, the only time I think about Gatekeeper is when I'm talking about it on HN. It gets turned off as part of a bash script I run after installing macOS, at which point it's gone for good.
On my list of annoyances with macOS, Gatekeeper is somewhere below the Library folder being hidden by default. I can't say what Apple will decide to do in the future, but I have a very clear line in the sand, and Apple has absolutely not crossed it.
Gatekeeper-by-default is sensible IMO. I've seen how some people interact with these devices, and how easily malware gets on a computer.
As long as the walled garden can be easily circumvented, advanced users can do what they wish. "Able to learn about Gatekeeper and decide if they should turn it off" is probably an okay heuristic for "can tell a fake Flash installer site apart from a real one" or even "knows that Flash is pretty much abandoned, do everything you can to avoid it".
That said, it absolutely changes the incentive structures, and Apple is also doing it for profit. Will they cross the line in the future, with this goal? I expect they will conclude losing the advanced users would be a net loss.
> As long as the walled garden can be easily circumvented, advanced users can do what they wish. "Able to learn about Gatekeeper and decide if they should turn it off" is probably an okay heuristic for "can tell a fake Flash installer site apart from a real one" or even "knows that Flash is pretty much abandoned, do everything you can to avoid it".
That's exactly how I see it! And this mentality continues throughout the chain, too—if you want to actually install unsigned kernel extensions, or inject code into other processes, you need to boot into recovery mode to disable SIP. This is still not at all onerous if you know what you're doing (and, like Gatekeeper, you only need to do it once), but it's definitely a next-level test for next-level privileges.
IMO, the way Apple designed this process is brilliant! And that's why I'm not personally concerned by the boiling water argument, at least not yet—whatever Apple's incentives, the current setup strikes me as the best way to handle things.
All of that said, where I am starting to get annoyed is with the root snapshot stuff in Big Sur. Having to reboot every time I want to edit a system file is a clear progression from "trivial speed bump" into "consistent pain-in-the-ass" territory. If you want to talk about Apple locking down the Mac, I'd start there!
Can't you still go through the song and dance of disabling SIP and authenticated root and then editing the root snapshot? It's incredibly annoying but should still work, right?
Generally things don’t like it very much when I lie to them about what OS they’re running on; I try to set the version just before opening Xcode and fix it then right after I’m done submitting the app so my computer isn’t confused. More than once that has been long enough for Software Update to get confused and offer me a new build :P
The problem is that it makes it clear that the market for third-party software is completely at Apple's pleasure.
If Apple chooses not to issue me a Developer ID, they have effectively removed 95%+ of my market.
If this is because I distributed malware, that's reasonable. But there are a lot of other reasons why Apple might choose to revoke a Developer ID. (Think pressure from the state, for one.)
I also feel like in the spirit of the OP: it’s like telling customers that they can drive without a seatbelt and it will save them time getting in/out of the car.
Most will look at you like you’ve got three heads, and (I suspect) the majority will simply walk away without purchasing.
Your just assuming it’s a pot and want to persuade me to jump into the freezing river instead. But Apple may have no intention to completely lock down the Mac. It may well be just a hot tub, and right now it’s quite comfortable. If it gets too hot, I’ll just get out.
I understand the analogy. You are asserting that it's a pot, but that's just an opinion. Anyway the analogy just doesn't work. Why can't I get out of the Apple ecosystem if it gets too hot, what's stopping me?
"The boiling frog is a fable describing a frog being slowly boiled alive.
The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death.
The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly."
In the case of Apple, at some point when they do something you really dislike you might be too invested into the ecosystem and it will be easier to just accept it instead of leaving.
But if you were not on their ecosystem already and were thinking of switching to Apple you would just think "Yeah, I really dislike that new move, I'm not buying into it".
I believe to get the behavior you need a brainless frog - they are shockingly functional due to how much behavior is in bodily reflexes. In that context the brainless frog sort of fits as a metaphor of "cargo culted" or tradition fixed behavior or single strategy. An approach well adapted enough to the expected environment that no thinking is required but is doomed as soon as it has to deal with change.
sorry to be pedantic, but if you believe wikipedia, it is true (just you probably cant reproduce it on your kitchen stove)
--
The New Psychology (1897): "a live frog can actually be boiled without a movement if the water is heated slowly enough; in one experiment the temperature was raised at a rate of 0.002°C per second, and the frog was found dead at the end of 2½ hours without having moved."
> But Apple may have no intention to completely lock down the Mac.
They've been very gradually locking it down for years and show no signs of stopping. Plus they have an obvious financial motivation to lock it down. To give them the benefit of the doubt here is naive to say the least.
There isn't really any - it's just a smaller change than banning unsigned apps completely. Their strategy for forcing people to use the app store is to very gradually make it more and more inconvenient not to. This is one of those gradual changes.
Imagine the next ones:
1. You have to enable an option in settings to allow running self-signed apps.
2. You have to disable SIP to allow running self-signed apps.
3. Apps can only be self-signed via Apple's website.
The second link seems like a massive problem for developers - but the tweet in that link has been deleted. What's actually happening?
If that were true, I couldn't just write some C, Rust, or Go code on my mac, compile it myself, and run the executable file because it's not signed?
There's got to be a way (developer mode?) to disable this, right?
Edit: Found some more info - only binaries that are compiled to run natively on ARM are affected (for now). Still seems like this will introduce some major inconvenience for developers/power-users.
But at some point you'll _only_ be able to run ARM binaries. Rosetta2 will go away. Like how Rosetta went away for non-ARM Mac's, and now they can only run x86 binaries.
I seriously can't overstate how easy it is to sign a binary. You don't need an Apple Developer account, or an internet connection, or anything other than macOS and a working development environment. Just go into the Terminal and type:
> codesign -f -s - [path to binary]
Unless something has changed on Apple Silicon, that's it, you're done, the binary has a signature. It does not have a trusted signature, but you don't need one. I think it was just simpler to write the OS assuming all executables would have a signature.
Do you know whether this applies to everything which executes? If my build scripts create a build script and run it I guess that will be ok, but if my build scripts build a specialised parser (say, from C source) I need to add a step after linking to code sign the generated parser binary before using it? Is that about right?
Have they announced that it’s temporary or is this an assumption? Obviously it goes away eventually, but going away in year 3 of a transition is a different beast than going away in year 10.
My personal thought - there's a hell of a lot more software written for x86 Mac than there ever was for PowerPC Macs. It would make sense to provide the transational layer for a longer amount of time.
That said, Apple has never been shy about aggressive transitions.
Yeah I have the same thought. On the other hand, SaaS and Electron were not really things back then. It's possible that if enough heavy workloads go into the cloud and basic ones just turn into wrapped web apps the actual underlying instruction set becomes irrelevant much faster.
The first link is very interesting. The author talks about the alert in terms of a dark pattern, but the notification directly lies to the user stating "cannot be opened." In fact, the app can be opened by simply command-clicking and selecting open. However Apple lies to users in an effort to prevent them from using these applications. Sounds like a possible tortuous interference claim, or possibly fraud. Surely this "warning" serves to prevent users from using apps where Apple doesn't get a cut, and cases them to use apps that Apple does profit from.
Seems like only binaries compiles to run natively on ARM will require signatures. Still seems like its going to introduce some inconvenience for developers/power-users.
Don't self-signed apps expire after a week? You'd need to distribute a new build every week for people to continue to use your app. That's not a major hassle if you're just using your own code, but if you want to distribute something to other people it quickly becomes very problematic.
I agree - for commercial development its a trivial step. But it's yet another barrier to entry for students and people that just want to hack on their own computer at will.
It's also a potentially dangerous first step towards forcing new versions of MacOS to only run code from verified developers - those that pay Apple. Again, trivial for commericial development, but a major issue for non-commercial use.
I have mixed feelings about this ... the yearly fee is $100 - i feel that is very much out of balance with what you get back in terms of cloud services, distribution, marketing, reach, etc.
The danger of saying 'the developer membership should account for that' is that they will actually run the numbers and come back with MUCH higher yearly fees that simply push many small devs out.
Bandwidth for app distribution is cheap. Marginal cost of developing App Store is nearly zero per app.
99.999% of apps don't get any marketing from Apple at all. Apps get lost in the crowd and the poor search that still struggles with obvious keyword spamming and rip-offs. Actual app ads are charged separately.
Apple doesn't increase your reach. They merely let you through an artificial barrier they themselves have created. I hate it that as an iOS user, I'm sold to you as Apple's product.
I can see manual app review getting costly, but Apple somehow doesn't wage war against free-to-user apps, nor they put limits or fees on excessive app releases. They're only upset when someone else makes money without giving them a cut. It's not about recouping Apple's costs, but increasing Apple's profit.
Pretty much nobody prices software or digital services by looking at how much they cost to provide and adding some margin, which is how this implies Apple should be reasoning. The common model is to price on value. Taking a percentage of revenue is a pretty good proxy for that.
And Apple absolutely does increase your reach. Not in any important technical sense, but by creating a low-friction, high-trust environment, which results in a much larger market for apps than would exist if purchasing required users to type their credit card numbers into your web site and download and run an installer. This is a huge part of why native apps even emerged as a major phenomenon on mobile, against the tide of webification that's swept the desktop over the last 20 years.
A percentage works fine, but you need a competitive market for that percentage.
> And Apple absolutely does increase your reach. Not in any important technical sense, but by creating a low-friction, high-trust environment, which results in a much larger market for apps than would exist if purchasing required users to type their credit card numbers into your web site and download and run an installer.
Plenty of companies will charge 5% or less for low-friction high-trust payment processing, and the auto-install is trivial.
Centralization significantly contributes to reducing friction and increasing user trust. Note that even on platforms that do allow competing app stores, market leaders can command similar percentages (e.g. Steam on Windows). This is why.
If Apple opened up the platform, developers wouldn't be paying 5% to Uncle Bob's Discount App Store instead of 30% to Apple, selling just as many units, and pocketing the difference as profit. They'd quickly discover that users preferred to buy from one or two trusted app stores, and that the better move was to pay whatever they had to pay to be present in those stores.
Traditional pricing, including value-based, only works in an actual competitive market where customers have more than two realistic options. In the case of the app market, it's basically cartel pricing where both providers charge the exact same amount.
Is it? I mean almost everyone is at least somewhat familiar with cloud services, SaaS, DBaaS etc. All of those services have established pricing models and it isn't based on X% of what your business charges.
Apple could easily charge $100 for an app to be reviewed the first time and $50 an update to cover review, and the rest is very marginal. What Apple is doing is rent seeking on other people's work, plain and simple... it isn't even based on the profit margin against that work.
Not every application is a game on a console that will see millions in sales to make up for development costs. Consoles only see dozens of games as competition, the Apple store sees thousands. It's not an Apples to Apples comparison (pun intended).
I can see manual app review getting costly, but Apple somehow doesn't wage war against free-to-user apps, nor they put limits or fees on excessive app releases. They're only upset when someone else makes money without giving them a cut.
This is exactly where most of the cost of operating the app store comes from. I'm not going to comment on how much of Apple's fees go to paying this, but testing software to release standards is expensive.
I remember 20 years ago, just to get started on a PS2 title, you had to pay sony a crazy dev fee just to get your SLUS code (I remember someone telling me it was about USD$50k). Then all of the devkits cost about USD$20k, and then sony still took a big chunk of your sales price.
How exactly would you like Apple to handle free apps, which still need to be tested and vetted? What if there was a $10k dev charge for each round of testing? How many free apps do you think there would be in the app store? Its true - all of the paid apps are subsidizing the free apps in the app store. If Apple didn't squeeze out other payment processors, every paid app would turn free, they'd use Square or something to sell people in-app purchases instead, and then the whole ecosystem would fall apart.
I guess another question we can ask is what are they testing for? Sony was exacting - there were strict rules about stability and content that had to be met. Your title couldn't stall on a waiting screen for longer than a period of time (I remember having to optimize our start-up on one title to meet this requirement). Even the terminology you used had to be correct - there was a list of acceptable names you could use to refer to the console parts like the controller - like you could call it "PlayStation 2 Dualshock Controller" but not "PS2 Dualshock" and stuff like that.
On the one hand, Apple isn't as exacting, but on the other hand presumably they're testing for other things you wouldn't have to worry about on a PS2 like calling dlopen on forbidden dylibs or sending the addressbook contents to a server. I'm sure that a lot of this is automated, but some of it will require a human to interact with.
The PS2 apparently saw 3800 release titles. This is compared to 957,390 games in the Apple Store. That is a lot more to compete against to recoup development costs.
Personally, I'd be okay if Apple charged a nominal fee ($100) to do an initial review to add to the app store, another fee for updates ($50) and say 5-10% of margins on a sliding scale... that would hinder some indie dev, but not be outrageous and cover some of that review cost, while not squeezing everyone out like a cartel.
But you’re still stuck with a collapsing ecosystem. $100 isn’t even close to the cost of testing an app in the App Store. The App Store doesn’t scale - you need humans inspecting the program and using it and they need a bit of time to do that. For decent testing you’ll pay $100/hr and it’ll take a few hours at least. I don’t know how you’d do an all-in customer-protecting test round of an app for less than $2000. Which means no more free apps. Or, you continue to subsidize free apps with income from non-free apps which means taking a cut of things like in-app purchases.
I’m not saying that 30% is the right number - it’s probably way too high (maybe?) - but if you want free apps, you can’t let anyone use their own payment processors because it’s a revenue hole and you literally won’t have any revenue that doesn’t go down it.
Do you really believe that Apple is doing much more than automated testing of applications submitted, especially with the many thousands of "free" apps that apple isn't getting any revenue for?
> Marginal cost of developing App Store is nearly zero per app.
And the marginal cost of copies of software is nearly zero, and yet developers still want to get paid, no?
> Apple doesn't increase your reach. They merely let you through an artificial barrier they themselves have created.
The important bit is they created it. And the barrier exists because things are better inside than outside. They made the iPhone, got people to add their card info and normalized paying actual money for 0s and 1s. The BATNA for developers is not "Apple opens their platform", it's "try getting customers to hand you CC info to buy your app on the WWW".
Yes, 100% agree with you. Even the user experience of the App Store seems deliberately crippled - it sometimes won't even show a specific app you search for by name! The idea seems to be force developers to spend even more money with Apple to promote their app on the App store.
That sort of accounting has never worked. Countless internet companies have gone bankrupt because they thought the marginal cost of supporting customers was zero, multiplied that by their customer base and thought that meant their cost base was zero. Turns out that’s not a convincing argument to use to people you owe money to.
A coupe of years after the App Store launched I’m pretty sure one of Apples execs said it cost over a $billion a year to operate. That will only have gone up since then.
App store absolutely does increase your reach. Find me another way to sell software to 175 countries in local currencies with full local tax compliance.
That's nonsense - your app may not get presented on the front page of the app store but it appears in search results, in similar apps and depending on your category can appear in top 100 lists.
I've published apps that got consistent downloads from a little App Store SEO - far more than any internet SEO and marketing did.
> I hate it that as an iOS user, I'm sold to you as Apple's product.
I disagree. As a user, Apple has, over the last decade-plus, earned my trust that the software I decide to run on my device won't...
* brick the device
* stay on the device in any manner if I delete it
* access my private data without my consent
* intrude upon the experience of any other app(s) except by way of easily-managed notifications
... etc.
As a developer, the App Store is how you explicitly inherit that inbuilt trust from users. One can't put a price on that, because there's no fungibility in trust. It must be earned.
Apple can, and does, however put a price on sharing that trust, as well as the ongoing infrastructure, tooling, and processes needed to maintain it: a flat cut of revenue.
Data does stay on iOS devices after deletion via keychain, and if the developer so chooses, they can sync your data at all times on their server to make sure it never, ever, goes away.
There is a rich tradition of extracting private information off of mobile devices. It's one reason why free apps are pushed more than equivalent websites all the time (ex: reddit, imgur) , because the dataset for adtech is far more richer. Some databases and system APIs are under a user alerted permission, but that isn't unique to an app store or review, it's an OS implementation detail. Same with sandboxing apps.
You have little access over running a network filter on iOS devices, and apple has had a history of rejecting VPNs that act as so.
You can still have all that you put on your list, but without an app store.
it does, but via restricting others' reach due to the barrier of the app store.
It's like a lottery ticket - if apple decides to feature your app, you will get a lot of business and have a lot of success (provided your app is actually any good).
I can distribute terabytes of my free apps every month without paying a penny to Apple. And all the time getting support, tools, etc from them.
And Apple has thousands of highly paid employees providing all those services to us, it’s misguided to assert its just the cost of bandwidth and servers.
The $100 is a screaming deal for us iOS developers.
Apple does increase your reach, the vast majority of customers would have no idea where to look for an app if they even had the desire to find one outside of those the big social sites create.
We don't know Apple's investment in the app store, from maintaining it to enhancing it. To blow it off as marginal is disingenuous at best.
I take no issue with app developers creating and selling an app off the app store. I don't think Apple should be able to interfere with that. I do believe they have the right to restrict another app distributed within the app store from being able to sell apps itself. That would be like Steam allowing Epic to install from its app to sell additional games/apps through the Epic store.
It’s funny how, as someone who builds cloud services, I thought your statement was going in the opposite direction until the end. $100 will buy a _ton_ of hosting that is more than adequate to run most indie app downloads for a year.
The counterpoint to my claim which you stated is that the App Store also provides reach and marketing, which are quite pricey. I agree that they are expensive services, but can you even name one example in the past 5 years (literally about half the life of the ecosystem) where the App Store promoted an indie developer into success?
It’s not just about hosting, they also provide basically the entire software stack you’re using. Pricing that is difficult but I don’t think it should be disregarded.
> but can you even name one example in the past 5 years (literally about half the life of the ecosystem) where the App Store promoted an indie developer into success?
>It’s not just about hosting, they also provide basically the entire software stack you’re using. Pricing that is difficult but I don’t think it should be disregarded.
The entire Software stack are included in the iPhone purchase price, and as of 2018 they are included in Apple's Services revenue on a per unit cost including but not limited to OS, Siri and Maps.
The software stack argument makes sense in consoles where they are selling at cost or barely break even from a BOM / Hardware perspective. But Apple is making industry leading profit margin on all front. So Apple is double dipping, as Apple like to call it in the case against Qualcomm.
The software stack argument would be fine if there was an alternative. There isn’t. For one reason or another apple says everyone needs to use their stack. When people buy apple devices they’re buying that simplicity and security that comes from apple controlling the whole software stack. If they want that “feature” they can do that but then to charge developers for it when they can’t use an alternative I find ridiculous.
I find the marketing argument silly. All apps pay the fees (well paid apps). Not all apps are promoted (almost by definition). You’re not paying for marketing. You could stretch to argue you’re paying for a slim chance to be promoted, sure. I think that’s a weak argument however given there’s millions of apps and only a couple featured at any time.
And android does have alternative stores. Amazon, F-Droid and even directly side-loading applications. Not everyone takes advantage and most sales go through the Google Play Store, but it still happens. Apple offers none of that.
AFAIK, Google also doesn't charge for dev-tools or access to dev options. I admit, however, it's been several years since I've done any app development for either, and then it was mostly a wrapper around a browser control with some custom integration for use with NFC.
> It’s not just about hosting, they also provide basically the entire software stack you’re using. Pricing that is difficult but I don’t think it should be disregarded.
What if I don't want to use their "software stack"? Frankly, as developer, I'd rather spend my time developing than learning Apple specific ecosystem. Heck, React Native and Flutter do me just fine. Develop once and run everywhere.
In the end what does that $99/year license get me? A fancy certificate to publish on their only app store?
Because Apple requires them to. If I wanted to ship a PWA in a Firefox-based shell using no iOS-specific APIs other than required (rasterize using OpenGL ES + Skia, Mozilla's JS interpreter, etc) they wouldn't let me because I'm required to use their browser and JS runtime, among other things. And they've deprecated OpenGL, so now you have to use their custom graphics API too.
I pay more for iPhones partially because the ecosystem is not yet fully crapped up with C++ programs with bad UIs, and I think Apple would argue this point too. You’re fully allowed to draw your UI with Metal though, and MoltenVK supports iOS. Many iOS games use almost no platform UI components.
Sure, but the argument becomes circular, doesn't it? They deserve X% because you use their APIs, and they force you to use their APIs. Congratulations? If it's so expensive to develop/maintain those APIs that they can't afford to part with them for less than 30%+cost of hardware, maybe they shouldn't require you to use them?
React Native and Flutter are lowest common denominator frameworks that make for lousy apps. My experience was so bad that I no longer even respond to recruiters for companies using React Native.
Apple should charge non-native apps a large premium to be on the store. They degrade every users experience.
> It’s not just about hosting, they also provide basically the entire software stack you’re using. Pricing that is difficult but I don’t think it should be disregarded.
You paid for that already when you bought the Mac that's mandatory for developing on iOS.
People pay for the simplicity and (arguable) security of apple devices that comes with a tightly controlled software stack. They buy the device with the expectation that 3rd party software will be made for it that they can use. Apple then says you need my software stack to develop that 3rd party software.
> they also provide basically the entire software stack you’re using.
Without giving developers a choice to use a different software stack this doesn't mean much. You first have to buy an expensive Mac in order to use the free iOS development tools.
They run stories every single day including about indie developers.
About the $100 - yeah getting some droplets is not a cost. Maintaining them. Scaling them. Writing say, a sync solution, or even data storage solution, THAT is the cost and goes well beyond $100 of course.
I feel like the $100 is just supposed to be a token amount to provide a speed bump for tire-kickers, spammers, etc.
If they were serious about it as a revenue stream, it would make sense to go with something more like the UE4 model, where it's free up until the point where you're a big fish, and then a more aggressive fixed fee kicks in.
I'm not sure that most of us have issue with the $100 cost of entry... even if it were $100 for each app for store submission and a lesser fee for updates to offset the review costs even. The issue comes down to if you spend even a modest amount of time/money on development of something to jump into a vast sea of competition, where someone searching for the name of your app specifically cannot find you and to add insult to injury takes 30% if your gross before you're even able to recoup costs and there's no way to work around their distribution or payment models.
Take Netflix for example, which doesn't run on Apple's distribution network... Should Apple have to pay for part of the deployment of all the assets and feeds? They don't... the margins are already thin and Apple frankly doesn't deserve 30% of that recurring revenue.
I think I agree with you, but it's interesting because you're actually making two points which are kind of the opposite of each other— on the one hand arguing that it's hard to pay the 30% before costs are recouped, but then also arguing that it's unfair to pay the 30% in perpetuity long after Apple's fixed costs (review, etc) have been recouped.
I think if anything this kind of thing makes the case for explicitly having multiple tracks— maybe an enterprise one where you pay a 5-7 figure fixed annual fee (for support, timely review, policing of the store for phishing/knockoff apps that target your own, ensuring a direct hit for explicit searches) and then either a single-digit percentage of revenue or for free "portal" apps, some other way that Apple is compensated for user engagement. And then a totally separate indie track where all the revenue is yours up to X, after which some kind of sliding scale kicks in.
In reality, there are almost certainly enterprise deals going on behind the scenes (or at least mostly behind the scenes, cough Epic) and the details of those are almost certainly very proprietary, due to how the negotiations would occur. But having at least one option for which the details are public would be nice.
The purpose is gatekeeping, and setting a minimum basis of quality. If the annual fee was $0/year developers would be worse off due to the flood of low-quality applications.
This is exactly what happened on Steam when the platform was opened to anything for a $100 submission fee - quality tanked and revenues even for established Indie developer have declined significantly.
I was doing some back of the napkin math earlier today to figure out just how much bandwidth Fortnite on the App Store has done over it's lifetime.
Assuming 116 million ios users with a 2.5 to 5gb depending on the device. That's 580 petabytes just for the initial download, not to mention updates probably push it into the low single digit exabytes range.
~445k in s3 costs according to aws calc, using a naive "there is 1 object in the bucket, it's been fetched 116 million times, and that used 580PB of fetch bandwidth."
>I have mixed feelings about this ... the yearly fee is $100 - i feel that is very much out of balance with what you get back in terms of cloud services, distribution, marketing, reach, etc.
Then the carrot the fee unlocks in terms of access to these services should speak for itself, without the stick of having no other choice.
Are we assuming that after more than 10 years of App Store, Apple didn't run the numbers and/or is taking a bad deal ignoring its bottomline for some reason?
Because Apple decided that only software they approve of can be used on machines they sell unless the user explicitly allows software Apple hasn't accepted (via ctrl-click). On iOS, Apple decided that users can't allow untrusted software at all. Users still end up paying $400-$1400 for phones that run this software, so the 'free market' has decided that users want a software model like this (otherwise Android would be an even bigger player in the US than it is now).
People still paid $1400 for PCs in 1999, nothing stopped US govt from suing Microsoft for bundling IE - let alone not allowing users to run "unapproved" software.
In US phone market, they do and this isn't just about monopoly per-say but what it means to "own" a computing device if you can only run manufacturer approved applications on it.
I can buy something else. In fact I did. The problem is that if you are making a product which will be consumed from a phone you have to support iPhone users and do everything Apple wants you to do.
To solidify this point, the majority of phones in the US run on iOS. iOS has 52.4% of the mobile operating system market on phones[1].
If you're selling an app, it's even more important to support iOS users because the App Store is responsible for three times as much revenue as the Play Store[2].
Yeah, 52% means that Android is nearly matched marketshare wise. The mobile situation is nothing like Windows’s share when Microsoft was sued for antitrust violations: the desktop market share of windows is still like 70%, 20 years ago it was like 97%.
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
You quoted selectively. It goes on:
> Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area. Some courts have required much higher percentages.
In addition, that leading position must be sustainable over time: if competitive forces or the entry of new firms could discipline the conduct of the leading firm, courts are unlikely to find that the firm has lasting market power
It is clear that A) Apple is not a monopoly and B) the market is very competitive
But Appoogle together clearly form a duopoly that does have monopoly power over the market. And they both charge 30% to App devs for the privilege of selling Apps on their respective platforms: coincidence or price collusion? Well it certainly looks like collusion from where I'm sitting.
(Yes, yes: Apple has just cut the rate for small devs. The big sellers still have to pay 30% though.)
Not sure if you're trolling, but that's not a rational option for most.
I've described elsewhere in thread why switching is not an option for me; Apple has slowly trapped me in their ecosystem of Apple TV, Apple Watch, Macbook, Homepod, my BMW which will only talk to an iOS device, iMessage, HomeKit
They don't provide any external APIs to interact with these products so other platforms/systems could make such a switch less painful.
I feel your pain: Apple slowly lured you into spending thousands of dollars on high-quality products which work smoothly together, and then they went and changed the EULA on you and now you can't install non-App Store software on it!
Only that didn't happen, of course: the rules have always been the rules, you just don't like them.
Which is fine, actually, complain all you want. But the victim act is hilarious. "My luxury car will only talk to an iPhone! I should sue!"
I personally switched to Apple products because they more or less Just Worked and they prevented me from fiddling with them: the big issue with Android phones for me was that, since I would always root and mod them, they’d always fail at inopportune times: by making this sort of tinkering not an option, Apple phones are just more reliable for me (and, sure, this is partly my fault but, from my perspective, the locked-down status of iDevices is a feature that lets me treat them like appliances)
from a European point of view, the market belongs to the people, not Apple and thus they must play by the rules the State set, for and on the behalf of the people.
And quite literally a choice for a browser, because Apple mandates that all browsers on the App Store use Safari on the backend, which means that Chrome and Firefox are just skins over Safari on iOS.
This would not be huge, because iOS devices don't stop getting updates for 6-8 years, by which time it is very unlikely that third parties would bother making a special browser app just for that unprofitable 0.1% slice of the market.
But don’t you think — it’s their phone, they have spent billions of dollars developing it, shouldn’t they get the choice of how their own product should work?
It’s not like the user doesn’t know what they are buying. It’s not like Apple doesn’t have strong competitors. It’s not like the app developers are like, “Oh, 30%?! I didn’t know!”
People want the product that Apple is making. They buy it knowingly and willingly in droves.
Look at the M1, the culmination of decades of hard R&D, beating Intel at their own game.
You want to tell this company — which is absolutely killing it and creating absolutely tremendous value for consumers the world over — you want to tell them how their own device should work?!
Explain to me why the free market has not spoken, and spoken clearly in favor of the products that Apple has brought to market for their customers. Why in the world should the US Government say that what this truly amazing company should do in their own code and product roadmap.
Honestly, it’s a travesty in the making. What Apple has accomplished — coming back from the brink — is one of the greatest success stories in the history of capitalism.
Why, why in the world should the US Government — a true paragon of incompetence — dictate terms on how they should run their lawful, competitive business.
>> But don’t you think — it’s their phone, they have spent billions of dollars developing it, shouldn’t they get the choice of how their own product should work?
No. Its MY phone from the moment I bought it. If I want to change some aspect of how it works that's up to me.
The phone doesn’t magically just work the way you want it to, and the functionality you personally desire doesn’t come without trade-offs and consequences to Apple, to other developers, or to other users.
You’re saying that because you bought a single iPhone that Apple now essentially reports to you. That YOU get to decide how Apple spends millions of dollars in its R&D, and that you get to decide how their software should function.
What makes you their master just because you freely chose to buy a single unit of a device from them? A device that, by the way, has sold billions of units.
It would actually require a massive investment by Apple to actually support all of those things as tested, enabled, documented, secured, stable, and fully supported (by the help-desk) features of their product.
This is a little harder to deal with because often its not obvious what repair issues you will have in the future or what will stuff up and be difficult to replace. The restrictions on ios are obvious and you would notice them within your 2 week return period.
>But don’t you think — it’s their phone, they have spent billions of dollars developing it, shouldn’t they get the choice of how their own product should work?
Maybe? But then they're not selling it, they're leasing it, and they need to say that.
Doesn't really matter: if you are making a phone app or service (especially one that has any sort of network effect), you need to support both ecosystem which means you must submit to Apple's ukases.
That player also has a history of tracking, fingerprinting and privacy violations that not everyone is comfortable with, especially relating to a device that has as much control over you as a smartphone.
it is not like these 2 products were identical except for sideloading.
They don't have the same hardware, Apple has an unlimited ad budget, if you want to chat with somebody using iMessages, you are pretty much limited to iOS, you can't transfer app purchases between platforms, etc
If you go into subscription settings on iOS devices, they show a "try out apple music" ad -- you think this position is available to Spotify/others? They don't pay 30% on top of sales to boot.
Same thing with Google, they cross promote their own new properties everywhere in Gmail (left pane) and Google.com but no one else has access to those locations, they can destroy thousands of small business through this practice.
Honestly it is almost funny how Google has been mostly unable to successfully launch new products while they have the capacity to promote them to virtually all of the global north.
In particular with Play Music .. not going to complain, I don't think that this market needs another FAANG product but wow, failing to promote that service is one epic blunder.
Exactly! And it's a bad kind of duopoly. It's not like I'm customer and I only have two choices. Here, I only two choices and I pretty much to use them both since if I drop one I loose a lot of potential customers.
Just because the people are generally happy with 2 options? If enough people cared about extra app stores, someone would create an alternative as there would be money to make.
and they did, Cydia was a thing when people could jailbreak iPhones. And I definitely remember some of my less tech savvy friends using non-Apple-approved tweaks back in 3GS/4/4S days.
Sorry, I don't use a mac -- could you clarify about ctrl-click to accept? Can you bypass the approved developer check box in system preferences with a right click on the `.app` folder?
Effectively - if you don't have "only app store" selected in gatekeeper, you can bypass the 'unidentified developer' option as well as the message when an app isn't notarized.
However please note that they publish the whole development toolsuite needed for free without obligation. This was not the standard behavior of commercials OS in the 1990's. (not sure who pulled this first)
So the 100$ annual fee is more like a contribution to be recognized as a professional developer with extended support and services. Heck if you work in a team you don't even need one account per developer.
This somehow guarantees that each account is linked to an identifiable real world entity and that bad actors won't massively create fake account for free to muddy the water around illicit activities.
So by imposing a relatively modest fee they improve both traceability and avoid spamming behavior. This sound like a sensible design.
PS: I'm amazed by how on the same thread people can complain that the 1 million $ threshold for rebate is cruelly low AND that a 100$ entry fee is an unbearable tax. Internet trolling at it's finest!
That's not my point. The point is there is no technical reason for requiring a Mac for, say, iOS development. I get that they don't want to straight-up port XCode to Windows or Linux, but nowadays you could run it as a cloud service. The price of admission for something like that would certainly be less than keeping up with Mac hardware. They don't do it because it runs counter to their business model.
The yearly fee is NOT to pay for any costs; the fee is a tactic to keep low-effort spammy app developers out, and therefore to reduce the load on the review team. The $99 fee does not cover the costs and expenses that Apple does and has done for you as an app developer. Dropping it would not affect their revenue directly, but it would open up the floodgates of random app submissions.
One could argue that the Mac hardware itself that you need to develop iOS apps is a similar barrier to entry though.
99$ could be a fees to show "true effort" for some developers in the world, while for others it could a monthly salary.
Also how can an app that has 500M downloads cost more to review than an app that has 500 downloads (considering both are paid apps and Apple charges 30% per download)?
It doesn't matter what the theoretical intent of the fee is. (Which would be impossible to prove either way.) They make a billion dollars from those fees.
The "yearly fee" could pay for it, it'd just be several billion per year. Their existing business model is the one that's best for Apple, users, and small developers.
So the developer of a free app used by 100 people should pay the same fee for app store distribution as the developer of a $10 app used by 50m people all over the world?
It's not just Apple, I think the fight shouldn't be about just fee but allowing 3rd party stores and applications that don't have an approval stamp from Apple.
Imagine, if your Tesla refused to move if you didn't use Tesla approved tires which cost 30% more because Tesla charges the tire manufacturer 30% for approving them?
> Imagine, if your Tesla refused to move if you didn't use Tesla approved tires which cost 30% more because Tesla charges the tire manufacturer 30% for approving them?
Fine by me. Their business what they charge and how their product is designed, not mine.
Not for iOS realistically speaking. You have to switch to Android, your only other choice, and suddenly all your other Apple devices don't really work that well.
Yes realistically speaking. Of course if you switch to a competitor things aren’t going to integrate as well. Perhaps you can immerse yourself in that ecosystem.
My argument is for interoperability and better 3rd party access to APIs within the OS.
My argument is not that Android doesn't function as well, I quite liked it infact but all my other apple devices basically lost half their functionality without an iPhone and Apple won't give access to 3rd party developers or itself make those apps for Android.
Apple won't even let 3rd party apps integrate with the system like their own do - which is why I wanted to shift away from an iPhone in the first place. Not because I hate or like Android, but because I can replace whatever parts of Google I don't like
It's actually a completely justified intrusion into the market.
To answer questions posed by others since I'm apparently posting too fast:
The reasons governments should intervene are well-elaborated in the blog post under discussion.
Governments worldwide already have plenty of control over what terms corporations can sell their wares to people on. For example, in Europe you must offer at least two years of warranty.
Corporations are government-granted legal fictions, so a government is free to impose whatever constraints it wants on corporations. In return, corporations get plenty of benefits like the ability to declare bankruptcy and not have it hit the pocketbooks of its executives. I would be fine with a regime where if a corporation doesn't abide by the rules, its executives become personally liable for debts, for example.
It's the truth. Unilateral control is the reality, and I'm interested in exploring how to harness it to improve the lot of humanity.
For example, I think Stripe should be able to compete with Apple to be a payment provider on Apple's platform.
As I said, I would be a fine with a world where if Tim Cook doesn't want to play by the government's rules, he is jointly and severally liable for Apple's debts. There are real benefits that come with being a corporation. There need to be responbilities to society as well.
I realize that the federal government /can/ do things, it's whether they/it /should/ do them.
"I want them to" and "It's been done before" don't fly. These are contracts between willing participants, none of which have been broken. The federal government would be overstepping proper bounds to interfere.
> Unilateral control is the reality
Yes. Which is why we should minimize the regulation coming out at the federal level.
> There need to be responbilities to society as well.
They owe you nothing. They provide a product, you either buy it or you don't.
You can distribute an iOS app yourself. Give the user the source code. Then then give them instructions on how to build the app with xCode and deploy it to their iOS device.
You can use the App Store effectively for free, just do what Amazon Kindle or Netflix does and have a separate website, without linking to it from the app.
This is completely about the kind of splurge in app purchases that are terrible for consumers.
First, Epic is hardly a no name developer. But secondly a great deal of apps work like this both big and small. The limitation is you can’t make purchases though an app by say asking for credit card numbers or put purchase links to your website from the app.
There are well known and detailed App Store rules about this stuff, if you want details just look it up. For example all those 2 factor authentication app fits this model where it’s meaningless to download the app without a subscription.
Yeah because regular no-name developers like Epic can't read the damn rules. It's quite simple. If you don't want to get booted off the app store then follow the rules. The rules are very easy to follow.
If you offer a multi platform "content" app on iOS then users should always have the option to create a subscription account directly on their iOS device. It's perfectly fine to create an account on a different platform and use it in the iOS app but this should neither be required, nor be directly advertised in the app.
Seriously, don't make random stuff up. Amazon and Netflix don't receive preferential treatment. If you want to make your own streaming app on iOS you can do that today as long as you follow the rules.
Sigh. It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to. You should go write an app for something else.
You can’t distribute it yourself for precisely the same reason you can’t distribute a game to PS5 yourself, or for reasons you could never distribute apps to blackberry or some other device.
As for the yearly fee covering costs, sure, you have a point. But remember, Apple could arbitrarily increase prices on that fee instead. Apple could charge directly for the tools. They could just tack on the 15% or 30% for the annual developer license for apps that some money-making m, non-free angel to them. We’d end up in the same argument.
An app is not just a bunch of bits strung together. An app needs to have a commitment of support behind it.
Part of “supporting” an app is using only the languages, compilers, apis, payment processors and distribution systems authorized by the manufacturer.
And please don’t bring up PC software. PC app marketplace is a shitshow. Platforms like steam have made it more reliable recently. But they’re still not tightly integrated into the OS as they ought to be.
If you really want users to control the entirety of the digital device then Linux & it’s partners are truly a worthwhile competitor. The fact that Apple’s device marketshare is larger just implies that the a significant chunk of human society (not skewed towards engineers or people in tech) agrees with Apple’s policy.
I just want to be able to run and distribute my own apps. It’s ridiculous and just plain criminal that this is not possible. Apple does not own my device and does not get to dictate what I do with it. Phones are so locked down that they are a real threat to personal computing and software engineering. The day where apple stops indies from publishing apps is near.
This is where antitrust attention needs to be laser focused.
Our freedoms are at stake, and this should be our rallying point.
The iPhone is a general purpose computer (email, photos, dating, payments, reminders, docs, web, games, etc.) and computer manufacturers should not be allowed to control the only means to run software on computers they sell.
This is less drastic than breaking the company up into constituent parts. But honestly we ought to also be asking ourselves why a computer manufacturer gets to be a film studio and distribution chain.
Currently the iPhone is a great device for almost everyone on the planet and the trust their users have in the 3rd party apps is a big part of that.
If Apple made it easy to put custom apps on the device it would mean you could more easily be tricked into installing malware and so reduce the trust in the security.
The iPhone is as popular as it is today due in no small part to how they have policed the App Store.
According to [1], Android makes up 60% of the US smartphone market share; but you're comparing many different brands of phones, all of which use Android, to the iPhone which isn't exactly fair.
You can see that the iPhone is still has the largest smartphone market share in the US.
Also, bear in mind that Android phones thrive in less rich countries like Mexico [2] or the Philippines [3]. The price of the iPhone is perhaps the largest burden for these people, but I'm willing to speculate that if given the choice, most would favor iOS over Android.
A big reason for me to switch to Android was this. I'm reasonably tech savvy, but still it was becoming painful to manage all sorts of app permissions on Android. Not to talk about all kinds of tracking that Google does by default some of which may even be impossible to turn off.
Between me and Apple I'm reasonably clear about the business transaction. I pay to buy a high margin device. In turn Apple assures me that they have a vested interest to do what's best for me (i.e., my privacy, no trackers allowed etc.,).
With Android we have bewildering choice of hardware/forked-Android and what not which come with pre-burned apps and app stores that one can't get rid of.
Google Pixel comes closest to iPhone but at that price point I might as well buy iPhone as Apple has better track record of respecting user's privacy.
Because it is essentially a duopoly, and switching platforms is not as easy as just not buying an iPhone.
For example, I recently broke the screen on my iPhone 7 and for this exact reason (not being able to run some Apple unapproved applications on my device) wanted to switch to an Android, but when I tried one out for a couple days
* My BMW would not show music cover art because only Apple had a deal with them in early 2010s
* iMessage no longer worked and I had to maintain an iPad for communicating to friends who only use iMessage and Facetime
* Macbook was suddenly a lot less interoperable with the phone - the easiest way to transfer photos was to push them to Google photos and download them on the mac
* Homepod speaker would no longer be controllable from my phone
* Apple obviously won't publish AppleTV(Remote) or HomeKit apps for android
In other words, you love and love paying for literally everything about Apple's platform, but you still haven't figured out what you are paying for, and you think you should get all the benefits of that platform (including the benefits accrued by it being a walled interoperable garden that doesn't suck), magically, even if you want to use other hardware and other platforms.
That's exactly my point, I don't love and love everything about Apple's platform and I want to move away but they won't let my Android device interop with Homepod or Homekit or Apple TV.
I just realized too late, what exactly I paid them for - it wasn't the device - it was the "experience" and I regret spending every penny on this experience because it is essentially a sunk cost now.
Nor am I saying it is, I'm telling you why switching is not an option for me which is what the parent comment asked.
I'm slowly reducing my reliance on Apple and have already abstained from getting the new watch or adding homepod minis to my current apple tv and homepod setup. And hopefully, as these devices weather out I will definitely make it a priority to not buy into a closed system like this again.
Yes, but that choice is getting harder with time. What happens when home automation and car automation is also controlled by these tech giants?
What if some day your account was banned because you said something against the "community guidelines" of Apple? Will your car, phone, TV still work? Will Apple buy them back?
That's already happening with facebook (oculus) and google as well (what happens to your android device? what about the photos you had stored on the cloud? what about all the sign-in with google?)
Oculus is an extremely niche product, barely out of the experimental stage.
Can you point to cases where people have been locked out of their Android phones?
If so, I’m surprised lawyers aren’t involved.
It’s not clear though, what this has to do with app stores.
If we think companies shouldn’t be able to lock us out of their products for speech violations, that seems like an important consumer protection that should apply to all companies.
- iMessage is built into the sms/MMS GUI and opportunistically "upgrades" sms chats to iMessage chats. This alone is a huge deal and makes me wonder why you would even ask this question.
- Everyone with an iPhone will have an account (the phone is practically unusable without one.)
- The app is built into the OS, when combined with the previous 2 integrations that makes it the only thing most iphone users are willing to use unless they have a very very good reason not to.
- I think the sharing UI has some special imessage-only shortcuts
How is this so hard for you to understand, iMessage gets shoved in people's faces and is activated automatically. It's extremely anticompetitive and isolates people not on apples platform. It's far worse than anything microsoft did in the 90s.
How exactly is anyone ‘isolated’? There just doesn’t seem to be any basis for saying that that.
All it does is improve the use experience for people who do use Apple’s platform. They are just as able to communicate with people who have SMS as they were before and vice versa. You are going to need to explain this ‘isolation’.
Literally billions of people use competing messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Facebook messenger.
It's not just preinstalled, it forces you to make an account to use the phone and inserts itself into what was previously the most popular messaging system in the US. If apple did something like this with the mail app everyone would probably completely flip out, the only reason they don't is because SMS was already terrible.
Flawed argument similar to the one used around privacy: People who don’t have anything to hide should not worry about big brother.
Well, turns out that you are telling me that companies with ungodly amounts of power and influence should be allowed to dictate our rights. This is why we desperately need regulation that puts consumers first.
Is that really the same type of argument? While I don't think, "Don't buy apple products then" is really a great argument it's not the same as the privacy argument. You do have other options. I don't have other options than to be spied on by the US government.
This is just as true for Facebook or Google or any messaging system. There is nothing special about Apple in this regard. It’s just a feature of current messaging technologies.
I stopped using Facebook earlier this year, and I am missing out on a bunch of social groups the contain people I know in real life.
What we need to do is build technology that doesn’t these downsides.
While we're at it, we can also just stop paying credit card swipe fees too by paying cash as well and avoid artificial preservatives by growing our own food, and while we're at it we can bicycle everywhere in order not to exhaust Carbon into the air.
Or as a democratic country, we can debate the laws and rules in which we would like businesses to follow for the privilege of selling products in the market and so they do not unhealthily, dominate the market.
You can still use a flip phone and a desktop PC running arch Linux.
Most users , even some of us can accidentally break a Linux install. Saving me from myself is what IOS effectively does. Look at the Android fortnite fiasco with users installing the wrong app and getting malware on their phones.
Even open source smart phones exist. Your more than free to custom write your own software on them.
I do believe that once I buy a device it's mine. I have jailbroken iPhones and an iPod Touch before, they were my devices and I did as I saw fit.
On the other hand I don't feel I have the right to dictate to anyone else what sort of products they may or may not sell, or how they work, beyond health and safety, accessibility, etc. I don't see that I have a right to tell Nintendo that they must write software to support side loading games for my Switch for example, or demand via government regulation that Sony can't charge a fee for developers to create games for the Playstation. As long as I know up front what the features and services are that come with my purchase, I have a free choice whether to accept them or not.
In particular, I certainly don't think I have the right to tell other members of the public that they should not have the option to buy those products on those terms if they wish. What right do I have to interfere in the product design of popular products, used by millions of people that are perfectly happy with them? Especially if that will force the company involved to change it's business practices and charging structure in ways those customers would not be happy with.
[edit: I missed that the parent comment was scoped to iPhone, rather than the OP story about Macs.]
You can distribute [macOS] apps directly to customers.
From Apple's site:
"While the Mac App Store is the safest place for users to get software for their Mac, you may choose to distribute your Mac apps in other ways. Gatekeeper on macOS helps protect users from downloading and installing malicious software by checking for a Developer ID certificate. Make sure to test your apps with the latest version of macOS and sign your apps, plug-ins, or installer packages to let Gatekeeper know they’re safe to install.
You can also give users even more confidence in your apps by submitting them to Apple to be notarized."
Yeah sure, let's just blast that silicon with some focused ion beam to overwrite the public key that the bootloader is signed with. It's that simple, right? Everyone could do it.
Where do you get a mobile device that's not a walled garden? It's just that Google's is designed with a gate slightly ajar. Continuing with your pet analogy, it's as if you could only get a dog or a cat, and it only eats food made by one specific manufacturer. You can convince the cat to eat almost whatever you have, but the dog won't budge. Want a parrot or a hamster? Tough luck.
I wholeheartedly agree with the OP article. You made a device, then you sold it. You shouldn't get to control it after sale because you no longer own it. Plain and simple.
I don't care about manufacturer "supporting" something. I bought it, it's mine now, I'm on my own, and please don't get in my way of modifying the thing I bought because I have the right to do so.
You're positing an example but not refuting mine - again, tell me, how is a cat supposed to be a dog?
> I wholeheartedly agree with the OP article. You made a device, then you sold it. You shouldn't get to control it after sale because you no longer own it. Plain and simple.
Apple didn't just "make a device" though. They don't make just hardware - they make software w/ hardware. The product is the whole experience. Expecting them to change how they design their product for the masses (that LOVE THEM), because you can't do exactly what you want, is wrong.
> I bought it, it's mine now, I'm on my own, and please don't get in my way of modifying the thing I bought because I have the right to do so.
YOU CAN do what you want with it. If you were perhaps smarter, you could hack into it and make it do whatever you want. You can throw it right off a bridge if you want! Congratulations. But Apple IN NO WAY is required to make it EASIER for you to throw it off a bridge. Sorry.
My point is, Apple purposefully engineered the product to give them more access to it than you'll ever get. It took them extra effort to do this, it's easier to make a device/OS without DRM than with it. You can't exactly hack it because that would require millions of dollars worth of equipment and some very specific knowledge.
I'm not renting it. I'm not licensing it. I'm buying it.
> Expecting them to change how they design their product for the masses (that LOVE THEM), because you can't do exactly what you want, is wrong.
That would empower their users. Developers would be actually making MORE apps for the platform because they would have the confidence that they'll be able to get that app into the hands of users one way or another. I've seen some stories of someone doing a lot of work making an app only to have it rejected because its very idea didn't resonate with the review team. There's nothing they can do to bring it into compliance — countless hours of work were wasted.
In other words - the engineered a product that is much harder to break, is more private, and is harder to hack. All things most customers want.
> I'm not renting it. I'm not licensing it. I'm buying it.
I buy a cat. I can't complain about it not being a dog. I bought it. I didn't "license" the cat, I didn't "rent" the cat. But I still can't make it into a dog, despite the fact that I own it.
Go ahead, hack it, if you can. All the power to you. That's your right. You can't impose your absurd dev geek worldview on everyone else. That's just wrong. If you want, make a competing device. But you won't.
The App store doesn't need more apps. No one complains about lack of apps on the app store. Androids are flooded with crap apps - I'd rather keep it the way it is.
How, exactly, limiting what YOU can do with YOUR OWN device translates into more security? I want to see people ask "oh, if only I had no ability to install apps unless the manufacturer of my computer approves them". Haven't seen any yet. As they say, if someone hits you on the head every day since childhood, you would come up with all sorts of reasons why it's a good thing, and then miss it if they stop.
"But people might get scammed by bad actors." They can as well get scammed on the web which Apple devices are capable of accessing. Or over text messages. Or over phone calls. Or in real life.
Your analogy about cats and dogs is wrong, by the way. Being either kind of animal is an intrinsic property of it that can't be changed. You choose one or the other. It's not like someone took an "universal" animal that is initially capable of morphing into a cat or a dog, purposefully locked it into being a cat forever, and then called it an iCat sold it to you for $999.99. On the other hand, an iPhone is inherently a general-purpose computing device, that was purposefully and artificially locked into only running software that was pre-approved by Apple, thus limiting what its user can do with it (without owning an electron microscope, anyway).
That's what I refer to when I say about "gate slightly ajar". The thing is, you only unlock the bootloader that boots the main OS kernel, on EL1. There are more higher-privileged exception levels in an ARM CPU, and Google makes use of those to implement anti-consumer features like the dreaded SafetyNet or DRM. Your main OS is considered "untrusted", and you never get to run any custom code with highest possible privileges, a.k.a TrustZone — only Google and phone manufacturer do. Magisk is a dirty hack which will stop working whenever Google feels like flipping the switch to make use of their TrustZone firmware.
This is the right answer. Apple’s not going to arrest you for jailbreaking your phone and running your own software. But they’re not obligated to go out of their way to support it either.
It’s not that they don’t go out of their way to support it. They actively try to stop it. All jailbreaking is, is gaining root privileges on the device. They could just add a little toggle button saying use at your own risk, we don’t support it.
By making it so hard to jailbreak and so hard to install apps not from the App Store, they make jailbreaking not the answer.
Their goal/feature/product, whatever you want to call it, is to create something secure enough that grandpa can’t get tricked into getting owned. Anything at all that allows people to disable security becomes an immediate threat for that type of user. If the side effect is that they prevent people from jailbreaking then so be it because they have no desire or obligation to support those users.
> I just want to be able to run and distribute my own apps
A niggle and not contradicting your main point.
You can run and distribute you own app. You can even share it with a few hundred people (maybe a couple thousand?).
What you can't do is distribute it in the App Store or effectively sell it outside the App Store.
Again, more a niggle and not disputing your point.
> The day where apple stops indies from publishing apps is near.
This point I will dispute. Apple isn't going to stop Indies from publishing apps. Apple loves developers (though sometimes they show it poorly) and knows they are the life-blood of the platform.
Subtle, different, but irrelevant in this context. Apple needs developers as much as developers need Apple. There will never be a day where Apple boots all Indies from the App Store. They would just as soon change the policies on locking the doors on their retail stores at night.
Users don’t care about indie crap as long as they get their Facegram and Instabook.
The harsh truth is that indie devs need access to Apple’s users, not the other way around.
And so you have to play by the policies that attracted those users to Apple in the first place, which includes the App Store with all its glorious kinks.
> The harsh truth is that indie devs need access to Apple’s users, not the other way around.
This is simply not true.
Instagram was the project of indie developers. Likewise many of the big apps which exist on iOS. The vast majority of software on iOS is small niche tools which are either fun to use or useful tools.
Apple knows this and they know they need indie developers supporting their platform.
I realize there are a fair number of situations where it doesn't seem that way. But there are a lot of times such as this where it's more than clear they do.
This absolutely improves the situation for a lot of indie developers, but praising Apple for it is short-term thinking. It's a strategic move, and it's not cynical to recognize that.
Praising Apple for doing the right thing for small developers is not "Short Term thinking".
It's a good first step, It should be recognized as such. There is a lot of room for improvement, but whining about something that puts millions of dollars in the pockets of indie developers is just not cool.
You have a point, but we can't ignore they are showing good will while being sued for abusive behaviour. Sure it's a step in the right direction, but it's much alike a kid giving his snack to one of his siblings when caught racketing their lunch money.
The issue is they are trying to make 15% seem reasonable. 1.5% is unreasonable. They provide developers negative value, it's just a tax on all transactions.
Last I checked, 15% is closer to zero than 30% so it's objectively better. Nobody is saying it's perfect or that there isn't a lot of room for improvement.
Yet the fact remains that what they’re doing is still not good. It’s a bad thing. Them taking a 15% cut for no reason other than they can is bad, and evil.
The reason people shouldn’t be praising them for loosening their iron grip ever so slightly is because they are currently in the midst of the most antitrust scrutiny they’ve ever had to worry about. With that context, this 15% reduction is clearly nothing more than an underhanded deflection tactic.
The legal system is the only thing that’s going to help “indie” developers. Apple themselves are not going to do it. They’ve shown nothing but more and more disdain towards competition over these past 10 years, and the only time that has started to change is when an actual legal threat appeared.
I don’t even know why I bother writing this, since it’s all obvious. And even though it’s obvious, some people continue to ignore it and come up with excuses for this company for some reason. I don’t know what that reason is, but I doubt logical arguments are going to make a difference. Hopefully the courts aren't the same way.
> Can we at least agree that this is 50% less bad. Or perhaps 25% less bad? 10%?
No, because as has been said many times already, it's a deflection tactic. Focusing on whether 15% is less bad than 30% is a bad thing to do because it accomplishes exactly what Apple's underhanded deflection tactic seeks to accomplish.
But if you really need that addressed, here's a response to your very important question: no, 15% is not less bad than 30% because it means Apple makes less money, and if Apple makes less money they might have to abandon their fancy new M1 chips, and the pace of technological progress will once again fall into stagnation. Sure, small devs will make some more money, but those small devs aren't giving the world shiny toys with rounded corners.
> Ultimately the impression I get from posts like yours is some people just think whatever Apple does is bad regardless of how it affects others.
So if Apple releases a cure for cancer, you get the impression that I'll think that's bad? What is even the point of you writing this, is it an argument? Are you trying to passive-aggressively call me something negative? How does this even relate to the discussion?
> What is even the point of you writing this, is it an argument?
When someone tells me that something which is good is bad. I point it out. When they insist on defending that with a bunch of irrational hand-waving, I'm going to call them on it.
Everything you've said that makes this "Bad" is supposition and conjecture. Everything which is good about it is actual benefits people will see. Even if it is indeed "deflection", the effect is a massive benefit for a huge number of small developers.
They only have to shut up whiny tech giants complaining about the cut. This thing started with greed and will end with greed. Small developers and users don't matter.
it isn't. By making a small concession here, apple prevented the law of society from opening up the walled garden (which is the bestest outcome for all, except for apple).
A corporation only under take actions that it stands to benefit from - it has zero ounce of altruism, even if what it did seem altruistic.
> By making a small concession here, apple prevented the law of society from opening up the walled garden
No they didn't. It's not clear if Apple would have ever been affected by government regulation here. It's even less clear if this would affect any potential regulation. This is purely speculation.
> it has zero ounce of altruism
Irrelevant and unknowable. While we can speculate about Apple's motivations, none of us have access to insider info on this so it is just speculation and ultimately doesn't matter.
The simple fact is it helps Indies. Whether it's altruism or pure profit motivation, doesn't matter.
> It's even less clear if this would affect any potential regulation.
Regulation only happens when there's public pressure for such regulation.
the argument by epic was that apple's 30% cut of revenue is too high. I don't agree because i don't see the %-take as the issue at all.
Apple is framing the issue as far away from the real issue as possible - that of the device being locked down and you can only install via the app-store.
By conceding to a 15% cut, they've steered the overton window of discussion to just the %-cut rate, rather than the actual issue of having a competing app-store (or at least side-loadable apps).
> Just failing to see how "Pay more to Indies" is bad.
let me give you a simile to illustrate why paying more to indies now can be bad in the future.
Imagine a charity trying to help feed the poor in a poor country, by donating large amounts of grain and food. Or try to help cloth them by donating free clothing.
It's not "bad" to receive these donations, but the un-intended side effect is that they destroy the local industry, and prevent competition from forming. Thus, the country has a hard time building up their own industry.
Of course, these charities aren't doing so with any ill intensions (which is where the simile deviates).
Apple hides the true issue of device open-ness by lowering their %-cut they take, and indies celebrate. But they are blind to the future possibility of being locked out by apple by decree (see epic), or some other arbitrary rule they create.
I don't think I've ever seen such an inappropriate and wrong headed analogy in my life.
> But they are blind to the future possibility of being locked out by apple by decree (see epic), or some other arbitrary rule they create.
Indies aren't stupid. Their paychecks come from the uncertain whims of App Store review. Many of them have gotten rejections for various reasons and had to fight for them or revise their apps to keep them in the store. They are the first to back other Indies when things go south. The same people who are celebrating this rate change were among the most vocal critics when Apple pulled Hey out of the App Store.
People aren't one-dimensional. It's possible to celebrate that one part of being in business with the App Store has gotten a hell of a lot better. Even while recognizing that other parts still have a sign on them that says "Here be Dragons".
This is an example of mob rule. Each individual in the mob has a different goal. If Apple makes concessions about something they least care about they can still gain half the mob on their side. The rest of the mob runs out of steam and gets ridiculed. It's the textbook way of dealing with a revolution.
HN users and Twitter users might both be developers but they're very different types of people that have very different views of the world of computing.
To brush it off as "cynicism" is ignoring the full picture.
Right, the app store is an issue for users not developers already invested in Apple's platform. That's probably a PR goal for Apple, to turn users and developers for other platforms into one group and iOS developers into another group.
Perhaps that’s because Twitter people are less well-versed in technology and its business models? This move is clearly moving towards a low local maximum.
If anything, it's the reverse since I'm talking about Twitter comments by independent developers who are directly affected by this. I'm pretty sure they are quite familiar with technology and their own businesses.
We've been seeing these blog posts for over a decade and this doesn't offer anything particularly new.
It would be nice to see one that actually offered constructive and workable legal solutions other than "make iPhones general computing devices" even though the concept has no meaning in law and would bleed into other industries.
And what would be so bad about this exactly? The comparison is oft made with closed stores for gaming consoles; but I don't see why regulating console manufacturers to require side-loading or third-party stores would be such a bad thing. There's no law of the universe which dictates that their business model be per-unit loss-leaders for game revenue splits.
In my opinion, it's an issue with the way it's being portrayed - not mentioning consoles, smart TVs, etc. can lead a reader to think that Apple is alone in these practices, when mentioning the other devices might provide more perspective.
When you are at the top of so many wealth lists you are subject to intense criticism that may not be directly attributed to you, but you are still taking advantage of. This is a good feature of the system.
The XBox has been allowing sideloading for a while now (XBox One and now Series X) and it hasn't caused any problems. XBox Live Indie Games for 360 was also not an issue. Sony had sideloading for homebrew on PlayStation at various points in time too.
I think making it a required policy (with allowed constraints) would not be harmful to consoles at all.
Requiring third party stores is more difficult, but honestly I don't think most people would need them if you can just sideload.
Don't you have to boot into developer mode on Xbox to run sideloaded apps? AFAIK you also can't access any store titles when in dev mode either. And UWP apps don't get access to the full power of the console, they run under the system OS.
Every game on a modern console runs under the system OS, there's a hypervisor and dedicated CPU/RAM resources, etc. You can run actual games in that environment and the performance allocation is documented. Certainly for professional-grade stuff you don't want to be in that environment but it definitely works.
You're right about the dev mode toggle, which is unfortunate. I'd like to see barriers like that go away, and it wouldn't be appropriate on productivity hardware. I don't have any expert inside information on this but I suspect it's an absolute requirement from game studios that don't want side-loaded apps being used to cheat or exfiltrate content - I think that shouldn't require a hard reboot of the console but maybe it's similar to the situation Riot has arrived at with Valorant where they demand full kernel-level control over your system from boot to determine whether you are trying to cheat at their games or not.
While some good and unique homebrew stuff certainly exists, I'm willing to bet the VAST majority of side loading and 3rd party stores on consoles would overwhelmingly be used for piracy if available.
It's merely an accident of history that we have general-purpose computing at all [0], let alone anything like FOSS. It wouldn't be hard to imagine a universe where all consumer computers were locked-down appliances, and general computing was limited to a small number of credentialed researchers and professionals. In such a universe, similar claims would be made about the only purpose for general computing being piracy, crime, etc.
At any rate, while I'd prefer fully open devices, it's also a false choice: strategies like Apple's code signing on MacOS could allow for authenticating binaries for the purposes of detecting piracy/malware, without requiring a monopoly on distribution.
> merely an accident of history that we have general-purpose computing at all [0]
and a good accident. But because it's such a good outcome for society, the society in question _should_ look to create more of this. Like how democracy is a mere accident, but it's a good outcome, and society should work to replicate it and improve it.
If parties under the current system don't stand to benefit, but the over all benefit is greater, then it's a good choice. Apple isn't entitled to own their walled garden - it's not a right. It's their privilege they built, but society can tear it down by decree if tearing it down leads to better outcome for society.
As someone that enjoyed the gardens of 8 and 16 bit computing, the accident was interesting, but I still would rather that Amiga and Atari gardens would have won over the PC.
When you put a barrier of entry on top of an activity, you will usually find that a large portion of the people who still take part in that activity are doing so because they have strong, even illegal reasons to take part in it.
If you outlawed general-purpose computing, a large majority of the people who still wrote code afterwards would be black-hat hackers. If you outlawed car repair, the majority of the people who took apart their cars anyway would be installing illegal, unsafe mods. If you were able to successfully outlaw encryption, such that there were genuine barriers to encrypting a message, then the majority of people who used encryption under the table would be people who were communicating about breaking the law.
The only people who are willing to jump through the significant hoops required to sideload on consoles are people who are either strongly motivated to write their own code and fix their own problems (ie, the almost ideological, morally driven homebrew community) and pirates. But part of the reason that's the case is because more legitimate actors can't enter the space.
There is no modding scene on consoles. There are no 7th graders making Xbox games using kits that they can distribute to their friends. There are no widely popular homebrew kits that almost everyone accepts as improvements over the default experience. There is no competition between distribution channels. There are no custom stores with specialized filters and moderation for niche content.
There are a lot of reasons why we might want to have dedicated, single-purpose hardware that can still be modified by normal people, but calls to say, "show me the community for this, and then I will allow the community to exist" are just backwards. I can't show that the majority of people hacking consoles are just writing mods for Zelda games and releasing custom 3DS themes, because the majority of people are not allowed to do that. It's not surprising that the people who buy specialized vulnerable games or modchips to reflash their expensive hardware at the risk of being permanently banned by the companies who make that hardware -- that the majority of those people are already used to breaking rules, and that many of them then look at piracy and say, "eh, I've already gone this far, what on earth do I have to lose?"
Of course pirates are common among sideloaders, you can have your accounts banned and your legal games taken away if you make a mistake. Who the heck other than most dedicated people are going to take that risk? What is surprising is that there's any homebrew community on these consoles at all -- that even with all of the stupid risks involved, that people are still willing to follow the law and engage with hacked hardware in a legal way that fosters a creative ecosystem of mods and custom software.
I think this is one area where legal theory is not up to date with how society interacts with technology.
For example, I strongly believe that Internet should be considered something akin to a utility, because it's such an integral part of our lives. If an ISP were allowed to filter the internet however it pleased, it could have a substantial impact on our personal freedom.
Same goes for smartphones. Given that there's only two realistic choices, the Apple/Google duopoly means there are real restrictions on what kinds of apps/services you're allowed to access. Yes Google allows you to sideload apps, but if you use the same arguments about "they built the platform, they can charge/restrict whatever they want" that people use for Apple, what happens if Google takes that away and you're left with no real choice?
I would have a hard time defining a legal principle of which industries are so critical that they deserve regulation, but I would say there's definitely an argument for applying it to smartphones, and less for something like game consoles. Ultimately it comes down to political discussions to decide what is worthy of regulation; over time, we've decided that things like transportation, finance, communications, food, medicine, and so forth require regulation, while other areas are very loosely regulated if at all.
Agreed. People that ask Apple to let iPhone to be completely open has no idea that their entire business model is based on vertical integration. Pretty much the opposite of completely open
My point was to collect the arguments in one place (to clarify my own thinking), and that we need to establish that legal definition already. We've run the "unregulated app stores" experiment for long enough, now it's time to do the work of defining these things and regulating them properly.
I'm interested in the bleed into other industries though, and would love some examples. It's important that laws be general enough not to be too targeted against particular actors but also to avoid side effects that adversely affect others in the process.
Essays by definition are to clarify one's own thinking. Why does anyone share them with others? Because we think they contribute something of value to others.
> General computing platforms should be protected from such predatory practices by manufacturers through strong government regulations.
I find it much more plausible that any regulations will end up entrenching market incumbents and closing off potential avenues for disruption. In other words, this can only make the situation worse or keep it somewhat the same, it won't make it better.
> Stifling innovation isn't good for anyone, and as more and more people become software developers, this really just hurts the small guys ... Indie developers need protection from monopolistic and anti-competitive practices from larger players in the market through strong government regulation, not a discount on their first $1m in sales.
Indie developers aren't the only stakeholders here, platform users are as well and any regulation will need to take into account their needs and interests. In purely numerical terms, the latter group outnumbers the indies by 100x or more. Realistically speaking, whose needs will any regulation give more precedence?
The top concern amongst tech users today is security, whether its security of personal data or a more diffuse sense of security concerning the integrity of public discourse conducted online. It's very hard to imagine any kind of regulation protecting indie devs without also introducing regulations on the distribution process itself, in order to protect end users in these two areas. The only thing harder to disrupt than a commercially dominant player is a commercially dominant player ensconced in a complex regulatory regime. This is not a reality that indie developers or myself (personally), particularly like, but it's the reality we have. Ignoring it won't make it go away.
> I find it much more plausible that any regulations will end up entrenching market incumbents and closing off potential avenues for disruption
Let's face it there are no disruptions incoming in the mobile OS space, similar to how no new desktop OS has been able to get significant marketshare since the 80s.
I don't share the pessimistic view mostly because there's a lot we do not know. The shape of all possible disruptions is hard to predict a priori. And desktop OS is nowhere near as dominant as it once was so significant market share there really doesn't matter as much as it once did.
I cannot disagree with a single word in that article.
I would also go further and mandate that all general purpose computing devices should be forced to have an unlocked (or easily unlockable) boot loader so you can easily acquire full control over your device and even install competing OSes.
Agreed, anything less that that is not just dangerous but also really inefficient & unecological, as devices abandoned by manufacturers can't be often easily repurposed for other uses due to locked bootloaders.
I think most people forget that Apple is paying the merchant processing fees on all of these transactions. On a $0.99 sale typical rates are 3% + $0.30. I’m quite certain Apple doesn’t pay full rate, but it’s entirely probable that they lose money on smaller transactions.
They have soft costs for app review and distribution but I can’t imagine they are significant whatsoever relative to merchant fees.
This is a fantastic loss leader to build marketshare and nurture app growth. They will probably have a lot of fledgling devs plow that incremental money right back into ads in a ‘virtuous’ cycle.
Thing is none of this would be up to guess work if we had competition enabled.
If you could offer "Pay with Stripe" alongside "Pay with Apple" and eliminate the forced price equality you would quickly see the user preference and value of Apple infrastructure/security/convenience.
Apple wouldn't be paying anything remotely like that rate - if they are, everybody involved in negotiating it needs to be fired. You're off by several orders of magnitude, therefore your conclusions based on the wrongly assumed cost structure are baseless.
Off by "several orders of magnitude" means instead of Apple paying the standard $0.33 on a $1 app, they would be paying $0.00033 (that's three orders of magnitude smaller) or less, because that's how orders of magnitude work.
Which is nonsensical considering it's easy to get a credit card that pays back $0.02 in rewards, which sets a reasonable floor.
Sounds like your claim is the baseless one here, sorry.
I would be curious to know what large online retailers do negotiate paying on single $1 purchases from someone who knows, though.
I don't have any data I can share because obviously negotiated rates are confidential... what planet do you live on?
Apple is going to be among the very largest merchants in the world by card processing volumes - it's actually ludicrous/naive/cute that you think they would have the same rate as a random family corner shop.
I'll give you a hint: the flat rate component definitely goes away over a certain volume. The % component then shrinks significantly too.
I would recommend you stop talking confidently about things you clearly have no experience with - card processing rates for large merchants.
That's about as much detail as I feel able to divulge.
$0.99 or $1 is a pretty common price for small single-purpose apps or for an in-app purchase. I think it's fair to say there's no way Apple is paying anything close to $0.33 for those many, many, many transactions, losing $0.03 on each one. If I had to take a wild shot in the dark, I'd guess Apple is paying $0.05 to $0.10 for those.
Of course this is part of the problem: We can't even properly evaluate the situation because this side of it is an opaque black box.
I'd really like to know how much all the people whinging think it would cost to offer the following to developers. Crunch your numbers and show your work:
1. A development platform that includes the toolchains and emulators for all the variations of the Apple hardware/OS environments (including the ability to distribute test versions to a restricted audience)
2. A secure platform for taking payments, including all chargeback risk, local consumer taxation requirements (VAT etc) worldwide.
3. A secure platform for in-app purchases, subscriptions, DRM on content (leave aside the arguments for/against)
4. Mechanisms for secure distribution to employee BYOD of employer specific applications, including capabilities to remove them from departing employees
5. A marketplace with search and discovery (however imperfect) that also provides for customer reviews, screenshots etc
Currently all of that (barring the MDM of point 4) costs a developer:
First of all, that $100 a year should cover all of what you just listed.
It costs Apple approximately $100 million to run the store. If the ~20 million developers are chipping in $100/yr, Apple is looking at $2 billion in fees just from developers. You can further take the costs of developing a secure platform just from the sales of iOS devices. (Its not like the iPhone is useful without the AppStore).
Apple is one of the most successful companies in the world worth over $2 trillion. They would be just fine dropping the fees from 30% (now 15%) to a more standard 2% for a basic transaction fee.
This is entirely ignoring the value third party developers bring to Apple's platforms. I'd argue Apple has hugely benefited from a robust selection of third party apps available via the App Store, and the quality and diversity of apps on that store has been a core part of the value proposition for their hardware.
Exactly. In many other markets, the retailer takes a full half of the sales prices. For instance, my parents are professional sculptors, and standard gallery commissions are 40-50%.
Then let there be a new retailer that takes less than Apple. If the percentage is truly unsustainable, they'll fail and we'll keep using Apple's App Store anyways. That would still proper competition in the market to set prices rather than whatever Apple's monopoly decides to set prices at.
There's a considerable difference between galleries holding physical goods with extremely limited space and needing to curate things for a specific market, and one of the largest corporations to ever exist approving software to sell on a virtually limitless marketplace for every niche and need imaginable.
A gallery offers prime-time, often times exclusive, exposure. It puts your work in front of a small, but exclusive, group of high-quality prospects and commands their undivided attention.
Apple does no such thing. It offers no exposure in return for their fee. Once published, your app is but an anonymous drop in the sea.
True, but the thing they offer doesn't require thousands of humans to administer either. Renting a building downtown and staffing it with a couple sales people is very different than the army of humans curating apps and developing the software requisite to produce the polished, trusted experience people get from Apple's ecosystem.
Apple's net profit margin is around 23% including hardware and everything else they do. Their app store margins are dramatically higher, possibly as much as 90%. A gallery's 40-50% commission translates to 0-50% margin after expenses and they do much more for you - exposure.
This is a strawman argument. To see why, lets compare with Facebook.
How much money does it cost to develop API servers to deal with apps which use Facebook sign in?
How much money does it cost to run those API servers in a performant manner?
How much money does it cost to make sure that those servers are secure?
How much does Facebook charge? 0.
I could keep going (or find many other examples), but the point is that the justification of a price based on the seeming cost to the provider isnt relevant.
The issue for me here is that I should be able to run the apps that I want on hardware that I have purchased. Imagine if you buy a TV and then all of a sudden, the Netflix app is removed from the TV because Netflix didnt pay the tv manufacturer AFTER you've already purchased it.
It's not strawman, because the discussion is whether or not Apple provide value for money to developers for their 15/30% cut of revenue from Apple's customer base.
The discussion about whether owners of the Apple device are getting value for money and/or freedom to use as desired is a separate discussion.
As for the last example, I purchased cable TV that had a Disney channel on it. Disney stopped providing that and wants me to buy their app instead. The cable TV subscription also used to include Comedy channel but removed it from their lineup.
If I make $0 a year I should be able to put the app on my phone without having to pay as well. And not just for 7 days and have to resign it every 7 days.
I am an gadget fan. I wouldn’t be caught dead with an Android or a Windows thingy in my hand.
Also a small dev. Here is the thing. Apple offers no revenue promise when I publish my app on iOS. If I don’t figure out how to market my app, it will just sit there and rot.
But as soon as someone buys my app, I have to pay 15% to Apple. What for?
It did NOT help me get my customer. If my app gets featured then may be I ll pay for the purchase bump. But what if I don’t want to be featured if it’s not worth the cut.
I am paying plain and simple because Apple has the key to my customers phone. Where I come from, that shit is called extortion.
> But as soon as someone buys my app, I have to pay 15% to Apple. What for?
Is this a trick question? It is the same walled garden model that game consoles have always had; have you noticed that most apps in the iOS store are games?
You'll run into the same sort of thing if you want to list your app/game on PSN, Microsoft Store for Xbox, Nintendo eShop - even Google Play, Steam, and Epic game store charge commissions, and brick and mortar stores add markup - the manufacturer or distributor rarely receives the full retail price that the customer pays.
The markup or commission exists so that the platform owner (or the retailer) can make money, some of which they use to invest in the platform, operate the store, pay their employees, pay dividends to investors, or just accumulate into a giant Scrooge McDuck-type pile of cash.
exactly - this, rather than the %-cut that apple takes, is my real concern.
I do not like that apple can dictate what app i get to run on my iphone. It's not that i want to abolish the app store - for non-technical users, the appstore is fine as it is.
But there should be an option to side-load an app. There should be an option to hook into a separate store like how android has f-droid. The store-front can compete on features, rather than by apple's decree.
The 15%-cut in app-royalties apple takes is a red-herring. It gives apple an "out" when discussing this issue. It prevents further conversation of opening up the device for competing app-stores.
You are being Pedantic. Yes, we all know it is commission. The iDevices are in effect portable computers. As Android and Sailfish run devices show us, nothing should stop Apple from allowing us to install and run softwares from outside their app store. The only reason to do so is to control our devices (they can disable any app, or even the whole device and make it unusable) and ofcourse greed to also gauge even more money from other developers.
The comparison with other closed devices, like gaming consoles, just attempts to divert focus away from Apple who is the most abusive in its attempt to control and dictate the apps that run on its platform. Obviously if developers are unhappy with Apple and Microsoft and Google's App store, they are also unhappy with the closed systems of consoles. And yes, what developers are criticising and demanding from Apple also applies to everyone else too.
In what way is apple any more 'abusive' than microsoft, sony, or nintendo are? What difference does it make, legally, whether the iDevices are 'portable computers' or not? Why shouldn't a private business be allowed to control what third party software it allows on its platform? There's no misrepresentation to the customer, and the customer has other options if they aren't happy with it. Naturally the developers want to keep more money (motivated by the same fundamental drive - greed), but again, if they consider it uncommercial they don't have to release anything on ios and develop for android only.
Obviously they don't, because they won't make any money - but it's disingenuous to pretend that apple's dominance of the mobile application market and its ability to produce the best consumer hardware and software is a fact distinct from the way it has structured its business and revenue. Developers benefit from apple's strengths and relation with its customers. It's a fantasy to pretend that disruption to the model will simply rearrange the bottom line without doing structural damage to the entire endeavor.
> Why shouldn't a private business be allowed to control what third party software it allows on its platform?
There's this thing called "consumer rights" that exists to ensure corporates do not screw us with their products and services. That's why.
> There's no misrepresentation to the customer,
The consumer is being lied to here that this is all being done to protect their privacy where as the actual objective is to even more intrusively spy on its users through these controls, and use this data to exploit them more. And this control also works to exploit developers.
> ... and the customer has other options if they aren't happy with it.
That already assumes that corporates have more more rights over their products than their consumers who pay to own it. If a product is owned by a customer, they should be able to do what they want with it as they are the owners.
> Developers benefit from apple's strengths and relation with its customers.
No, they absolutely don't. Developers benefit better when they strengthen their own relationship with the customers, without Apple as a middleman dictating terms to them and charging them exorbitantly for the same. Apple even goes to the extent of limiting functionalities, to retain its control.
> It's a fantasy to pretend that disruption to the model will simply rearrange the bottom line without doing structural damage to the entire endeavor.
That's a huge exaggeration. Even otherwise, it doesn't matter if said disruption sinks Apple. Another will take their place.
"Consumer rights" is nebulous and meaningless in this context. No legal right is being infringed upon. It is not against the law for a private business to control its platforms, in fact its something that private businesses routinely do and have done long before apple came along.
Marketing and PR is also unremarkable and not peculiar to apple. iPhone customers are absolutely not being lied to in the relevant sense - there is no representation that an iPhone will allow you to run any software outside that approved by apple in the app store.
"The customer should be able to do whatever they like" is a nice sounding dogma, but has no legal basis and isn't supported by standard practice for many products. Your example only demonstrates a power imbalance if we assume that the customer has already been forced to own an iphone for some reason. In reality the corporate and the consumer have the same power - the corporate to develop and offer a product on its terms, and the consumer to either accept that offer or to purchase a different product.
Developers demonstrably do benefit from apple's strengths. Their revenues are overwhelming on the back of an ecosystem built and maintained by apple essentially from scratch. If developers didn't benefit, they wouldn't develop for ios, simple as that.
The point is, the developers are on the same boat as apple, so sinking it is a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. And there already are 'others' - it's not apple's fault that they're shit.
I don’t get why people use the argument that they couldn’t possibly need the revenue from the App Store to keep it running. It isn’t a non profit business. What about all the money they spend on the hardware research and so many many other things. Some initiatives fund others and stock holders are very happy to see a profit.
I keep seeing critics, who may also be developers, arguing with developers on why they should be unhappy. The truth is, there are enough happy developers and customers to show that there is a healthy ecosystem. If there wasn’t then it would leave a gaping hole for a competitor.
I’m happy to pay for apps and happy to pay my cut for selling apps on the platform.
There are benefits to having a closed ecosystem just as there are to an open one. There are trade offs. I’m not sure why anyone complains about the Play store charging similar fees when you can distribute apps on android in other ways. If that is so much better for developers and Apple doesn’t earn their cut then I would expect to see a mass exodus to Android development.
I personally prefer developing for iOS and Mac. I don’t mind their fees. I find the customers to be very happy. I appreciate alternative perspectives but the tone of all of these articles complaining about Apple making money off of the ecosystem they created is so off putting to me.
Which is why it is good that we simulate competition using legal battles against Apple, since otherwise they have no reason to improve things. Apple wouldn't had reduced their rates like this if not for Epic pressuring them, so the lawsuit against Apple made the world a better place since now Apple is a bit less rent seeking than before.
The only concern I have is Apple has incentive to promote higher take apps over lower take, so they benefit more from pushing the 30% take apps over the 15% take.
As long as we don't end up with a tiered App Store like XBOX Arcade or Steam Greenlight back in the day then all good. If the 15% apps become pushed less that is no fun.
There is some benefit to a standard price market, most stores are 30% [1]. Tencent MyApp was even 55% until 2019 [1]. Epic Games is 12% but they said they are profitable around 7%-8% [1][2]. Steam, Sony, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon all 30%[1].
If everyone went to 15-20% across the board it would be better. I am concerned about tiering of the market and down the line lower take apps being less pushed.
If they had done the exact same thing they did today but settled on 10% instead of 15% I am extremely confident that the response from HN would have been the same.
And that's despite 15% likely being near to or below cost for Apple. Remember, Apple sells a LOT of store credit through retail gift cards where Apple probably sees less than 80 cents in the dollar.
Apple didn't lose much by reducing commission to 15%, when they are top heavy, anyways. Based on one of the articles (not sure about how trustable data was, though), while the new commission effects 98% of developers, the net revenue impact would be on the order of a percent or two.
>Developers should be free to choose the payment processing service that best serves their needs, whether that's Stripe or Paypal or Apple's built-in offering. Apple's payment processor should be chosen because it's better, not because you have no other choice.
I'd like to note though, that users also should be free to choose the processing service that best serves their needs, not because they have no other choice. I'd much prefer paying with Apple Pay instead of Paypal. If Apple ever allows developers to provide different payment processors, I hope they make it mandatory for developers to also include Apple Pay as one of the options (just like they did with Sign in with Apple).
I understand that 30% is big, and does have an impact on some business models, but it also acts to align the incentives of the platform-developer with those of the app developer. The fact that Apple makes a bunch of money off apps makes it beneficial for them to continue supporting the ecosystem, by providing APIs, functionality, and other support.
What surprises me most about Apple's model is why they don't offer better support to developers. It seems that iOS the 'rich users', whereas Android has the 'cheap users', so Apple doesn't even bother improving the developer experience.
There have been measurable improvements over years to things like app review times etc, significantly so in some cases.
Whether _any_ review process in a store the size of Apple's can justify taking 30% is not obvious to me. As size goes up, costs usually go down in a healthy market. The App Store is barely recognizable in scale vs launch day, but financial terms for developers have barely moved.
I have spent a bit of time thinking about this, and can't really come up with a way of calculating a 'justifiable cut' for Apple.
Would it be their cost per average app? Should it be a fixed fee with a variable rate on top? Should they license access like the videogame companies used to? Won't these smaller profits further incentivize Apple to offer competing apps in every category, and dis-incentivize quality control of third party apps?
My conclusion (so far) is that it's best to let each platform developer choose their business model, and see which one works best. Business models can compete along with hardware and software.
Cost of framework development is a fair point, and they do continue to add things like ARKit, the Swift language, and a million new submenus in Xcode ;)
But that's been true of all OSes for decades and doesn't make iOS specialized compared to macOS or any more deserving of 30% of every developer's gross profits.
How is that a fair point. Developers don't WANT bespoke frameworks that lock you into a single ecosystem. We would obviously prefer open standards and specifications supported by multiple vendors. The popularity of frameworks such as Flutter and QT or APIs such as OpenGL and Vulkan prove that. The SDKs Apple chooses to provide are entirely elective on their part and we shouldn't pretend that as developers, they deserve to charge us for this.
I've been an Apple developer for decades, but the last few years have been exhausting and I'm ready for a break. So I'm switching 100% to Linux development.
For now that means contracting work for others, who are integrating Linux into their systems (embedded), but as soon as I start seeing a viable way to get paid to build Linux-only software for a mass market, I'll take it.
Personally, I think the old models work fine on Linux: shareware/freeware, donation-ware, simple/cheap licensing terms, etc.
I wonder what the SublimeText and Reaper guys get for their Linux builds? I'm sure it is not insignificant, but I'm not sure its significant...
I'm a bit slow thinker, so it took me some time to put this into words. This article helped me to do it.
Google and Apple app stores are mechanisms which are used prevent, snuffle and destroy competing digital services. They prevent competition by collecting 30% tax. They snuffle competition by setting their own rules and controlling app store visibility. They destroy competition by closing companies from stores. Why it is important, is that smartphones are the most used platform to consume digital services. Digital services can be apps, music or anything distributed digitally.
Why it is financially so small business right now, 15Bn for Apple right now, is just that they have not used their full leverage yet.
Why you need to make rules for all App stores, for example Facebook virtual reality, is that it is feasible, that these will later become platforms, mainstream customers expect to have services.
How it works (if further explanation is needed):
1. If you are offering digital services to consumers or companies, your customers will expect them to be present in both platforms.
2. You have to pay tax, so both of these companies take a cut of your business, which prevents competition.
3. They can add offer the same service, and advertise it over your services, which snuffles competition.
4. Even been closed out by either of these, likely destroys your business.
4 happened to one of my products
I'm building a new product, and I think it is likely, that Apple and/or Google will use 3 to compete against me in some timeframe. Even if they don't I will be paying 30% tax forever.
Edit: Now that I think about his further, nothing prevents extending their reach to nondigital services as well, such as airbnb sales - they just need a new 'innovation' to the app store rules
Steam was established earlier than the App Store, and everything you buy there is very locked down to the Steam platform. Try uninstalling Steam and still play your bought games and they wont work.
Also Steam has an even higher rate than 30%. Yet Steam get a free pass in most rants like this, why is that?
From other threads, Steam lets developers generate steam codes for free, and sell them elsewhere; it only gets its cut if the sale happens on Steam.
They also don't have a history of making inconsistent review decisions that seem to be business oriented rather than customer oriented. I'm sure there's some examples, but most of the publicized removals have been for things like totally broken in unfun ways games, and games where a totally different game was published in the same slot. Often, customers get refunded for purchases when things like that happen.
I think Steam has also earned a fair amount of goodwill by not being as terrible as most other game download services, but maybe that's just my perspective.
Because the only people who use Steam are those who are happy with it. People that don't like Steam can use the Microsoft Store, Epic Store, Origin, GOG, the Ubisoft Store, buy physical copies, etc. so they probably just do that instead of complaining about Steam. And the same goes to publishers, in fact many of those stores were created by publishers that weren't happy with Steam's cut.
This is flat-out false. It's true that many games on Steam use DRM of some kind (either through Steam itself or a third party) but there are many others that don't, and can be used with no restrictions once you download them with the Steam client.
I think that a private company making their own hardware product should be allowed to control what third parties get access to their hardware and should be allowed to charge whatever they like for it, and the market will decide whether or not there is any demand for it.
I think someone who purchases a product should have the right to do with it as they please, and in the case of a computer or phone that means installing and running whatever software they feel like.
iPhone or any "mobile" phones are not actually phone's. They used to be, at a point in the distant past. With internet connection and a processor more powerful than the computing systems of the past era, these devices have to reclassified as mobile computing devices.
Then these predatory tactics would be subject to antitrust, and the perpetrators can be brought to justice.
Or, is the legal system and the elected representatives so inept to act on behalf of people?
> For decades, developers were able to create and distribute their software, whether free or for a fee, to anyone with a PC or laptop.
But if you wanted to get paid, whether by going through a distributor or building your own payment- and billing system, it would cost you way more than just 15% (especially if you factor in the lost time dealing with all that).
Global distribution, sales support and payment, for just 15%, that’s possibly the best deal that’s ever been available to developers.
The definition of general computing devices i.e. Personal Computer (PC) is correct and applies to smartphones. Making open usability a legal requirement makes sense and is what we need already for a long time. The difference between a cellphone and a smartphone is that the former is an appliance and the later a portable general purpose computer.
I’ve said it before. Because Apple has that tax the incentive to create an alternative OS is very very high and it needs to be because it’s a monumental task.
So the question is: do you want to be stuck with iOS and Android forever (lower incentives by governmental demands) or do you want to see a new player in the market in a decade or two?
I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but the most basic thing I do not get about these complaints is if the people making them have ever seen the markup and overhead that goes into retail sales of physical products? It's not like I can manufacture a product, send it to Walmart or Bestbuy or whatever, and expect them to only add a few percent on top for credit card processing fees, so I can reap almost all the potential profit.
I realize what some developers are looking for is a way to directly reach consumers. Have they ever tried to ship physical products to consumers? Logistics takes a lot of effort. Sure, we're talking about software so the "shipping" costs are so small that it's hard to even measure on a single download of an app. However there's a whole virtual storefront with curation, ratings, security, payment processing, and the APIs and hardware platform trust that comes along with it.
If we go back to the physical store analogy, a lot of indie developers are getting value from being featured in the Apple or Google stores. It's a little like a large national retailer picking up some startup's product to feature in their stores. Or it's like being allowed to open a small store in a mall with major anchors. It means that the mass market will see your product and will trust it better than if you have some small shop off in some weird low rent location.
Maybe 30% is too much for this, or maybe the app review process should be better, or maybe developer support should be better, but acting like the platform and the store don't cost anything to maintain, and aren't worth anything seems really naive.
Huh? You can buy full featured smartphones right now that let you sideload apps and alternative app stores. If that matters to you, the alternative is available.
How have we forgotten how expensive software packages to develop such free to distribute applications were.
Or worse, that such software packages actually came with a distribution license, where royalties the way beyond any 2020 "tax" had to be paid back per installation of software developed with such compilers.
> The 30% number was based on what video game consoles were charging developers.
Actually, the 30% number was based on what Facebook were charging developers.
Like I get that we're all nerds here, and thus hate FB, but can we at least remember that the reason the west has F2P games everywhere is because of Zynga, Facebook and Farmville?
These days im hounded by apple marketing reps begging me to spend money advertising in the app store. So now we pay for access (yearly fee), discovery (apple ads) and if we happen to get anyone to pay (apple tax). Tim Crook!
I really hope governments crack down hard on companies like Apple and Nintendo. You shouldn't not be allowed to force control of the device after you sell it if the customer.
Important to remember: 30% is an issue, but unilateral control to ban, censor, and "pull" entire businesses offline on a whim is even more scary and dangerous.
So Apple creates a closed ecosystem and everyone is cool with it for years and now we are demanding that they need to make it an open ecosystem?? Lolol
If one considers the App Store as a marketplace and that it can be considered analogous to E-Commerce marketplaces, then a 15% fee is actually directly in-line with the standard set by Amazon and Walmart.com.
Except consumers gets to choose between Buying from Amazon and Walmart.com, or many other smaller E-Commerce Marketplaces.
Also Note 15% fee from WalMart and Amazon includes many cost and delivery.
Some comments likes to use Freedom or General Computing devices as argument. I think those are beside the point. The question is for most consumers right now, and in the future, are Digital Market Place, Smartphone and Apps considered essential as part of our daily lives. If true, the questions becomes if one company holding 50%+ of market shares and 70% of Total Apps Revenue in a market that has near monopolistic market power requires some form of regulation.
I have purchased 25 Acer Swift 3 laptops this year for my staff. They cost about $650. They come preinstalled with unnecessary Norton antivirus software (which defaults the installation of a lighter version in its standard uninstall flow), Dropbox, Firefox, ads for Netflix and Amazon on the desktop, and a persistent “Would you like to use Skype?” popup program separate from Skype itself. Consumers have a clear choice to tolerate this bloat, or to pay more to Apple to avoid it and ensure only high quality software runs on their computers.
Apple's reluctance to fully supporting progressive web apps makes me think they see PWAs as a real threat. As long as the APIs continue to mature, I could see PWAs being the the thing that breaks down the gatekeeper wall for apps and returns the web to being open again.
Change is coming, Apple can feel it (which is why they made this PR move), Epic can feel it, some devolepers can feel it (complaining about Apple and Google a year ago felt like talking to a wall), yet some people on HN can’t feel it, or just plain refuse to.
It is about time Apple gets pulled down to Earth and faces scrutiny like all other major companies do.
I can take comments like this seriously only if you are a full-on convinced communist. “A company making profits!?!? By providing a whole industry with extreme value?!?!? With products people love to spend money on????”
>Now that Microsoft and Apple have introduced app stores on Windows and macOS, they plan to slowly erode our freedom on PCs too so that they can reap the same financial benefits on our labour on all computing platforms
I haven’t seen any indication that MS is trending in this direction, nor could I envision how they would go about doing such a thing. Fuck Apple though. Rent-seeking scum.
Right you are! My mistake on including them as an example there. I should fix that.
Edit: While they're not taking the same fee (honestly, 5% is pretty great!), they are the original company recognized for their "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy. I'm super impressed with Microsoft's turnaround on open source, but I'm still leery of them long-term, especially if leadership changes down the road.
He's not right. Windows comes with "telemetry" (read spyware) you cannot disable (unless you got a corporate version). Also UEFI has not exactly been without controversy.
What does collecting telemetry have to do with walled garden ecosystems that are used to squeeze every ounce of profit out of developers? Doesn't even makes sense.
So you think, sure Microsoft may lock users out of control of their own computers when it serves their monetization interests but they would never do anything so crass as control third party developer access in order to squeeze profit out of them?
Ex-Microsofty Gabe must have been pretty paranoid when he decided to bootstrap a linux based gaming platform out of fear of being locked out by Microsoft.
Windows 10 S is how they would do it. It's optional, for now. But that's mostly because it hasn't been successful. If Microsoft was able to get more apps on the Windows Store, I have no doubt they would start introducing Windows 10 S devices that can't be unlocked to full Windows.
