Macworld considers this change to be a very minor concession to Apple's anti-steering rules:
> It doesn’t sound like the new guidelines will allow the apps to even state that subscriptions or purchases are available on the web. Rather, the apps will be allowed to, “share a single link to their website to help users set up and manage their account,” according to Apple’s release. That account management might include purchasing or renewing subscriptions, but it sounds from Apple’s release as if the single link in the app may not be allowed to say “subscribe for just $9.99 a month” and instead must say something like “Account Management” or “set up your account.”
If this is the case, the change simply does not go far enough. Users should be able to get full information in the app on all of the payment options for a given service, and how the money they pay gets distributed. Any less is anti-competitive.
>Users should be able to get full information in the app on all of the payment options for a given service
Why? Do you know how the money is distributed when you buy groceries, when you buy a meal at a restaurant, when you buy your clothes, when you buy a book, etc? Does that get you riled up to not know? Why is it different?
After a purchase the app developer is the one providing content, customer service, app updates and bug fixes, etc. It stands to reason that a customer is doing business with the App developer not Apple. In all of your examples, they are products where the company setting the rules of the transaction is the same one that is standing by the product itself.
It seems completely reasonable to me that the provider of a good or service should be able to communicate freely and directly with their customer about something as core to the transaction as their options for paying for the service.
When you buy those products previously mentioned, what options do you have to pay? You don't pay Nike for the shoes when you buy them from the store. You don't pay the author or the publisher for the book. Those people have already been paid by the vendor at the wholesale rate. You are reimbursing the store plus their markup.
The store also doesn't generally review the boxes of shoes and ensure there's no references to nike.com on them, and if they did, there's plenty of other stores for Nike to sell at.
If you want the analogy to make sense, let's assume there's exactly two places that sell shoes and they have a stranglehold on the market, and they both mark shoes up the same amount and far more than they would if there was competition between them on price, and they refused to allow any reference to nike.com and how you can get shoes far cheaper there on or in any of the packaging.
That would be a very dysfunctional market, and I think the reason would clearly be the anticompetitive practices that prevented competitors and that resulted from them not competing on price.
It is even worse than this, btw, as the markets are disjoint: there are two places to buy shoes, but virtually all customers shop at either one store or the other store (for practical reasons of cost and convenience that are similar to those seen with someone having to buy things from a store in a different physical region of the country than where they chose to live), making each store separately a monopoly over its relevant market.
The retail analogy doesn't quite fit. Apple isn't just the shoe retailer[0] they're also the company which supplied Nike with all of the sewing machines and stitching yarn that was used to assemble shoes made with Nike leather and rubber. Nike signed an agreement with Apple which says that in return for an endless supply of sewing machines and yarn, Nike must split the final revenue with Apple.
[0] And even retailer isn't quite right. What the App Store does is less akin to the wholesale-retail model and more like the agency sales model.
I think the more reasonable analogy is that Apple is a Mall and the different apps are stores in that mall, but in this mall they don't charge you a flat monthly fee, they charge you a percentage of your revenue and to make sure you aren't cheating on that they make you use their cash registers and credit card machines.
As a consequence there are incentives for the stores to decrease the amount of money they make in the normal way and they instead try to find strange ways to make money that the mall doesn't get a cut of.
For example if you buy shoes at the shoe store they will send you new colorful shoelaces every month if you mail them money.
But every now and then a store will come up with clever new way to make money that doesn't give the mall its cut and then the mall throws the store out and leases its space to a competitor. Or just announces method X of making money also needs to give us our share.
In my personal opinion (and I recognise that this is a controversial view on Hacker News) Apple should be entitled to the same thing Epic Games asks for—which is the right to decide how much their intellectual property is worth when used by other developers to build commercial products.
I think the issue is that once you become a monopoly (as Apple's store is: users choose--for any number of reasons where this is frankly likely only one small one where they might be as pissed off as anyone else--between two stores that also-frankly have similar terms anyway, meaning they don't really have a choice anyway, but then developers can't choose: they are held hostage to access that market), you lose some of the "rights" you have as there is no way to compete on terms. If Apple were to separately say "you can either build on UIKit and Metal, in which case we take 30% of your revenue... or you could use HTML and OpenGL, in which case, well, good luck?" then I think a lot of developers would avoid Apple's frameworks... and if they could explain why to the user--that every time you buy a movie from us you are spending an additional $1 for the UI framework Apple is providing--they would agree wholeheartedly, as that shit adds up fast.
I have a choice about where to buy groceries, a meal, clothes, and books. Is it really that hard to understand Apple's hegemony on iOS should be regulated similar to the way Microsoft was.. I guess for Apple stockholders it might be different.
Ask people that live in towns where Walmart has cleared out all of the other stores to see what choices are.
When people sell items through big box stores, those stores buy the items at wholesale. What happens if Apple changes from the 30% structure to a 50% wholesale/retail?
You'll notice I compared with Microsoft, another maker of an OS. I don't think analogies work that well when comparing something that is Turing complete vs. not.
Fitness apps compete with gyms, movie apps compete with theaters, learning apps might even compete with schools, etc.. an OS provides the capabilities to do all of these things. I'm sorry, but your analogies make zero sense to me. Apple should be regulated at least the same way Microsoft was, and the Open App Markets Act does this, and I'm glad to see it. I don't think small changes like this are really the way to fix what's wrong with iOS and Android, even though the latter is more open.
Group think here appears to be that apps are not retail products. What are they? Services? Group think here is also that Adobe is evilCorp #1 because of their software as a service model vs a single purchase. Yet that goes contrary to the app devs wanting to constantly hit the user for in-app purchases. It's software as a service in a different manner, but still gotta keep paying to keep using.
App devs should have an honest conversation with the devs of pre-app days. You had to have a release completed so that it could be sent to the facilities to make the dis[c|k]s. These had to be way more complete than today with the ability to 100% re-download the actual product that has had extra time to complete. There's also the cost involved in getting those physical objects made. Today's app devs have it so much easier, and yet want so much more.
I think devices, OSes, apps and services are all retail products. The extent to which Apple sells a locked down device is the the extent to which it's trying to unfairly control multiple secondary markets.
It's irrelevant how easy or hard developers have it, the consumer can pick if they want to pay once or have a subscription for the feature set they want in apps.
>The extent to which Apple sells a locked down device
The closed nature is the only argument that carries water with me as far as being anti-competitive. Every business has to pay to have their product distributed, and the 30% just never sounded unfair to me.
30% isn't unfair if you provide enough services, it's the lack of competition stemming from iOS being closed that's the problem. Google _had_ to do what Apple did with 15% for small developers. Google didn't do it on their own, they had no reason to because Apple wouldn't change until it saw regulatory and legal pressure. Is that a normally functioning market?
Allow alternate app stores, and you'll likely see as much competition on mobile as there is when comparing Itch vs. Steam.
I have to deal with physical retail products where you have a wholesale price hopefully at least doubling your cost for the product. The MSRP is ususally double the wholesale. So if you sell the product directly, you get to earn the reatil rate directly. If you offer your product directly to a retailer, you only get to make the wholesale value for that sale. If you get to a size where you are selling to a big box store, they will negotiate further into your wholesale rate on the lure of larger volume of sales.
So, all of that to say I'm used to getting 50% of the retail price by selling to wholesellers, so being able to have a 70/30 split being offered by Apple would be 20% increase in my earnings.
Yeah, I owned a retail store (in the same area code as you coincidentally). Even though we marked everything up 80-100% our profit margin after expenses would be 2-3%. This is typical. If your retailers are doing >10% profit margin then they are extremely lucky.
Apple is making upwards of 90% profit margin on the App store. With zero inventory risk and no competition. In the real world, those kind of margins would attract immense competition... which would bring those margins way down.
Anyways, for reasons that I'm sure you're well aware the App Store vs. brick and mortar retail comparison is pretty useless. I wish people would stop using it (though in this case I appreciate that you provided context for your response).
The question remains though - at what % would Apple's take start becoming unfair and how did you arrive at that number?
Ebay and Amazon take ~10%, you can also sell on your own website through advertising. No options exist for mobile app devs other than the two app stores on two platforms, except for Samsung and Amazon device owners which offer their own stores, and possibly F-Droid.
Not upset at all. I can have a conversation with people that have differing opinions than I do with out getting upset. However, would you care to explain how you feel "group think" shows. someone being upset? Would you prefer "majority opinion", as it clearly is. How is group think different than majority opinion and why has it offended you?
Why would Walmart allow Kelloggs to advertise their products availability for less in a different store, on Walmart's shelves? Or Kelloggs saying that you can pay them direct and the just help yourself to their product from Walmart? It undermines the whole premise of commerce. If you want direct sales (sideloading, which should be optional), pay for the infrastructure. Don't expect to sell rent free on someone elses...
Don’t be fooled by allowing a link here or a link there. Stores are currently benefiting most from people not seeing the fee structure, and they’ve probably figured out that most people won’t really follow links either.
What would work is being forced to actually show things to users, directly in their face, at the time of purchase. As long as a user has to follow a link first, there’s still a pretty good chance they just won’t bother.
Just imagine how app store sales would change if the stores were required to tell users what is actually going on (as you would see at any cash register or online web site shopping checkout page, by the way):
Your New App — $6.99
Apple Store Fee — $2.20
Taxes — $0.80
-----------------------
Total — $9.99
Wouldn’t seeing the above change how you view any number of app purchases, especially for recurring purchases?
What if, when playing games (which Apple makes, by far, the most money from), you saw the same breakdown, every time you did a consumable in-app purchase:
MyGame Gem Bag — $6.99
Apple Store Fee — $2.20
Taxes — $0.80
-----------------------
Total — $9.99
Wouldn’t this completely change the average person’s view into the store’s cut?
Until THIS is what purchasers actually see, any other “concessions” allowing “links” mean nothing.
I prefer the exact opposite. Moving from North America to Europe was great, because no longer do I get a nonsense bill with all sorts of weirdo charges I don't care about stacked on top of the advertised price. Rather, I pay the price that is advertised. I absolutely, positively, do not care about the varying cost components of my purchase. I just want to know what I have to pay. The vendors and tax man can work it out amongst themselves.
Like, do you think that the practice of airlines advertising $49 flights if not for the $20 9/11 fee, and $40 oil and gas fee, and $20 airport improvement fee, and $30 per page, and... for a total of $327.84 round trip is actually beneficial to the consumer because it provides some kind of perceived transparency that we're supposed to be mad at some nebulous other if we're unhappy with prices?
In the US, airline tickets must be advertised with the total price (including taxes, fees, and surcharges) as the most prominent amount. The seller is also allowed to include the price breakdown at their discretion, and almost all travel sites do.
The breakdown is important because it lets consumers consider the impact of tax legislation passed by the government officials they vote for. If you don't care about the breakdown, you don't have to read it.
This kind of price transparency would be a consumer-friendly improvement to the app store checkout process. Not only because it lets users see where their money goes, but also because it lets users discern that they could be getting the same product or service elsewhere at a lower price (or be able to support the developer with a greater portion of their purchase amount). Forbidding this disclosure is consumer-hostile because it prevents users from understanding this.
This seems like a subtle way to announce a pretty significant change. It sounds like Japan’s regulator has insisted that reader apps be able to link to their own websites, and process payments outside of the 30% tax that Apple imposes.
If it applies for audio, video, newspapers, books etc, will it apply for Fortnite?
In order to qualify for this definition, the singular purpose of the app must to be provide access to "reader content" or non-interactive material like streaming media and magazines.
A highly interactive video game rendering natively on the device cannot be a "reader" app.
I can see regulators in other regions wanting to finish the job on this now that blood has been drawn - clear, direct, win. We'll likely be seeing death by a thousand cuts the next 5 years across all of Big Tech.
If I’m reading this right, it’ll be possible for “reader” apps to link to an off-app signup page directly from the launch screen (correct me if I’m wrong). Which means that you’ll be able to compare the friction of multi screen payment versus one-touch TouchID/FaceID payments to determine what makes you more money (because sometimes those conversion drop-off rates will be greater than the 30% Apple fee).
If this is accurate, this is an incremental move toward sanity. Still not enough, though; I’d like to run my own App Store, and I think my $2000 payment to buy my iPhone was more than enough of a fee to make this possible.
> you’ll be able to compare the friction of multi screen payment versus one-touch TouchID/FaceID .... sometimes those conversion drop-off rates will be greater than the 30% Apple fee
That can be countered by adding the 30% Apple Tax for those who opt to pay using "Apple Pay". If you have to pay "$x + 30%" on Apple Pay vs only "$x" through another payment system, the consumer will obviously think twice.
I agree that a press release is a one-sided publication, but it has the benefit of wearing its bias on its sleeve. Nobody is going to be misled about whether this is objective reporting.
And it's not like the mainstream press are guaranteed to be accurate or objective. For example they did, in various people's opinion, a rather poor job reporting on similar news out of South Korea yesterday. A much better, more considered take on this was posted by Hoeg Law on their Virtual Legality podcast a few hours ago. Well worth a watch if you're interested in hearing legally informed views which might differ from the Hacker News mainstream community view.
Hoeg has been covering the Epic vs Apple trial in excruciating detail and has done an excellent job of communicating it alongside explanations of legal jargon and legal principles.
> The update will allow developers of “reader” apps to include an in-app link to their website for users to set up or manage an account…. Reader apps provide previously purchased content or content subscriptions for digital magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video.
Presumably that one link is to the publisher's own website which can then offer any number of payment mechanisms, e.g. Stripe, PayPal, or directly entering a credit card number.
I'm generally supportive of Apple's right to a revenue share from apps which sit on the App Store shelf and/or rely on Apple libraries and APIs—but even I think Apple should just completely give up on attempting to share revenue from multiplatform reader apps.
There's a lot of reasons why I think this, but for me the main reason is that the thing of value here—the creation of desirable content—occurred entirely outside of Apple's developer agreement and any of Apple's intellectual property associated with it. Plus it's a just a crappy looking thing for the largest company on Earth to do when directly competing with other "reader apps" in the streaming music and streaming television spaces.
Basically that is all I have been ranting about for years since they announced their Service Revenue Strategy in ~2016. Apple could charge game and software 30% all they want, but they shouldn't charge for access to iPhone user as in so called reader apps. Which some people disagree with not long ago (cough).
Unfortunately vast majority Apple supporters or Apple apologist seems to think Apple deserve everything because it is Apple's App Store.
Now signing up a remote teaching class which is basically a group video call ala Zoom doesn't require to pay 30% of that to Apple.
Edit: And I will just add, before 2016 that mandate to have signup link, most of these Services and Reader App were just fine. Apple argued it gives bad user experience because the App does not have any sign up link. That is BS. In reality no-one discover these Apps on App Store. The discovery process does not happen on App Store. It would have at least gave Apple a minuscule creditability if App Store Searching had actually worked. But it never did. People discover the services outside of App Store and download those Apps with links. ( And they know full well how all these worked and killed their Apps affiliation program in 2018 ) And as shown in court document Apple actually knew this and how the App Discovery process drive Apps related Ads which leads back to privacy etc etc. Basically there is whole new level of hypocrisy just to achieve their Services Revenue Goal by 2020.
>I'm generally supportive of Apple's right to a revenue share from apps which sit on the App Store shelf and/or rely on Apple libraries and APIs
This is nothing else but Apple imposing a tax. If Apple wants to pretend it is a nation state I think regulators of actual states should take notice and treat them like the peer competitor they intend to be.
Not even the Judge in Apple vs Epic agrees with this. For a very recent reminder of this, Virtual Legality today posted his observations[0] about the South Korea law and how the effect of it is being misreported in the media (and to be quite frank, by commenters in Hacker News). In here he reminds us about how people are improperly conflating the "right" and the "means" to collect a revenue share.
Not sure how that dismisses the claim. He argues that this is not a tax because Apple is not just a payment provider, but provides a marketplace? that's exactly what any state does with a tax, finance the commons. Except that in this case, Apple is staking out its own territory, competitors excluded, playing digital landlord.
Apple didn't merely "stake out" its own territory. It created its own territory where none previously existed. And being a landlord is a perfectly legal occupation, even if it doesn't win you many friends.
In my personal opinion (and I recognise that this is a controversial view on Hacker News) Apple should be entitled to the same thing Epic Games asks for—which is the right to decide how much their intellectual property is worth when used by other developers to build commercial products.
Should this be expanded to every manufacturer of devices and operating systems? Maybe Intel/AMD get their cut, and so does what ever Linux you happen to run from any purchase made on device? Why stop at apps? Why not expand to web stores, groceries? Or maybe if you use computer for stock trading should they also take 30% of all trades?
Does Apple deserve a piece of the action for every instruction executed on iPhone?
They've allowed web to go untaxed. Kind of.
There are web standards for accessing more of the device that they've ignored and have chosen to treat differently. Maybe a judge should tell them they're not allowed to have a browser if they're going to treat apps differently.
They've corralled 50% of Americans into their bubble, and they're telling businesses to get in the correct lane to access them.
> There are standards for accessing more of the device that they've ignored and have chosen to treat differently.
Developers who have signed Apple's developer agreement and utilised the libraries/APIs are being held to the terms laid out in that agreement.
A website is a website.
Whether you agree or disagree with how Apple has chosen to operate their iOS ecosystem—again, I believe that reasonable people can disagree—it's certainly not unlawful for Apple to distinguish between developers who rely on Apple's work (SwiftUI, Metal APIs, etc) and developers who publish web pages with open standards without any involvement by Apple.
The context of this discussion is government commissions putting pressure on Apple to revise their policies "or else".
Developer agreements and rules being unlawful or not doesn't seem to me to be a relevant framing here. One of the party can basically change the law if it goes against common sense or society's wellbeing.
To be clear, what you're advocating for is the nationalisation (internationalisation?) of Apple's intellectual property as a reward for building a very successful product.
I'm not saying this isn't a valid opinion to hold—I'm not necessarily opposed to nationalisation in other contexts—but I just wanted to make sure you were aware of what your opinion entailed.
It was a regression to go from a world where we could repair and freely install to one where we could do neither.
It's further mired by the fact that Apple went from less than 10% market share to over 50%.
As consumers, we can't repair our devices or run the software we want to on them.
As small businesses, we can't ship software the way we want to anymore. It has to be in the form of an app to reach the target audience. We're audited, policed, and taxed. This isn't for some niche hobby or market - this is the primary form of computing for most Americans. We have to waste effort to develop applications twice because reasons, and we're treated like dog shit all the while.
Both sides of the coin suck, and the 800 lb gorilla in the room isn't going away. It feels like we woke up in bizarro world, because this shouldn't have ever become the status quo.
We are not talking about forcing them to GPL their OS or publish their API sources, or even allow uses of whatever they invented outside of their system.
Just "don't prohibit app devs from putting links to external web pages".
> Does Apple deserve a piece of the action for every instruction executed on iPhone?
"Deserve" is an entirely subjective question to which reasonable people can honestly disagree. To which reasonable people can express differences in degrees or in the margins.
The law (currently) says yes.
• If you write code that embeds or hooks directly into GPL libraries/APIs, then the FSF would insist that your creation inherits responsibilities under the GPL license and must be made available under a compatible license. In a sense, the open source community gets "a piece of the action".
• If you write code for distribution on a PlayStation, Sony would insist that you comply with the license terms associated with their developer agreement. Sony gets "a piece of the action".
• If you write code that relies on material supplied to you through the Apple developer agreement, if your app hooks directly into Apple iOS libraries/APIs, then Apple Inc says that distributing this software must be done in compliance with the license terms you agreed to under the Apple developer agreement.
1 and 3 seem to hinge on the ideas reimplementing apis is impossible without infringing on copyright for which google v oracle has already shown this isn't the case. For 1 whether dynamic linking counts is also still an unclear topic but still not relevant for the API portion. There is also the point that "and we limit the only way you can do anything on our device is via this licensed path" is different than "and these are licensed paths". Similarly it may be more steps but it still doesn't change that it's a forced contract to work on a device at all regardless if that's a direct decree or a forced path.
2 is a semi reasonable comparison but "and x does it" isn't proof "and therefore y is right". It could be that both x and y are wrong and y was just challenged first due to prevalence or that y is subtly different than x.
Google vs Oracle answered a very different question. In that case, it was ultimately determined that Google could mimic an API in their own code, when building their own independent work-alike system.
Whereas in the case of iOS applications, developers are agreeing to the Apple developer agreement and then directly embedding and/or linking to Apple intellectual property when compiling their binaries.
--
As for the analogy I made to the GPL, this was only to demonstrate that the open source community also leverages the enforceability of license agreements to require developers who use GPL code in a certain way to comply with community expectations. It's the same legal principle, even though it's used to very different effect.
> It doesn’t sound like the new guidelines will allow the apps to even state that subscriptions or purchases are available on the web. Rather, the apps will be allowed to, “share a single link to their website to help users set up and manage their account,” according to Apple’s release. That account management might include purchasing or renewing subscriptions, but it sounds from Apple’s release as if the single link in the app may not be allowed to say “subscribe for just $9.99 a month” and instead must say something like “Account Management” or “set up your account.”
https://www.macworld.com/article/354963/japan-fair-trade-com...
If this is the case, the change simply does not go far enough. Users should be able to get full information in the app on all of the payment options for a given service, and how the money they pay gets distributed. Any less is anti-competitive.