They want to retain control over their customers; at the same time, force the developers into relying entirely on Apple as a middle man so that they can't cut Apple out of any transactions.
This way, Apple gets their cut and user's get some level of privacy.
That they can get away with this arm-twisting as "privacy" is to give credit to their brand positioning.
Arm-twisting? You are conflating two issues here. Every company wants to retain users and their business. That is how every company operates. You should judge a company on what they offer as an incentive to keep them. Privacy as a service on their platform is a great thing. Compare that to what other companies offer as incentives.
> Every company wants to retain users and their business.
I think GP's point is that Apple is doing this using lock-in, rather than having the best possible products.
If there were multiple app stores for iOS users, you could argue that Apple is behaving just like every other business. But they're not. They're stifling competition to lock their customers in.
Indeed, but which of the big tech companies does not use lock-in as a tool? Android Play Services, Google Photos, Amazon Prime, Facebook platform, any streaming service (library is „lost“ if you stop paying)..
I think you misunderstand what I meant by lock-in. Everything you just mentioned is not a lock-in for users. You can use your Android phone with non-Google operating systems without hacking your phone. The same is not true of iOS.
If you buy an iPhone, which is a big investment for most people, then you must either use Apple's App Store or jailbreak.
One person's incentives are another's abusive vendor lock-in.
Each time you use the sign in with Apple button, it becomes ever so harder to switch away from Apple products.
Each time your friends add you to an iMessage group chat (instead of, say, a WhatsApp one) it becomes ever so harder to switch away from Apple products.
Each time you buy an Apple home speaker or Apple TV or whatever else it becomes harder to switch away from Apple products.
Google's stuff works better if you're all in but works fine piecemeal. Apple's stuff works fine all in but doesn't work at all piecemeal.
Tech folks should be up in arms about all this, but all you see on this wretched forum are rationalizations involving "business models" and "paying customers".
You want to see a software maker actually care about people's privacy? See Mozilla. Oh but you can't set Firefox as your default browser on your $1200 iPhone, sorry.
At their size & scale, these tech behemoths want to be your platform and be in between everything. So the question becomes, everything else being equal among them which would you choose and why? Privacy is a good enough reason for me and I'm sure others as well.
Since the beginning, Apple wants to justify its premium by it just works which has allowed novice users to use their Macs and then iPhones and other products. With privacy, it's another one of those "it just works" plus "you don't have to worry about it".
If Apple can tie security to its already high brand equity, it will be and continue to be in a good place in today's fear mongering world. It's always better to sell a pain killer than a vitamin and security is top of mind for consumers now more than ever. If nothing else their advertising campaigns are pushing that education onto consumers.
Each time you use the sign in with Google button, it becomes ever so harder to switch away from Google services.
Each time your friends add you to a Facebook Messenger group chat (instead of, say, an iMessage one) it becomes ever so harder to switch away from Facebook.
Each time you buy an Amazon Echo or Google Home or Chromecast or whatever else it becomes harder to switch away from Amazon/Google products.
At least iMessage is based primarily on phone number, so you can turn off iMessage and keep your contacts. Deleting your Facebook account or trying to change Gmail addresses means losing it all. Lock-in is only lock-in if you let it be. Personally, I worry more about Google than Apple, but your mileage may vary.
> They want to retain control over their customers;
Comcast also wants to retain control over their customers -- they want to sell customers internet access, while also selling ISPs and websites access to the customers. This strategy doesn't make the customer better off. If Apple treats their captive customers better than Comcast it's not due to any strategy of being a "middle man".
> They want to retain control over their customers; at the same time, force the developers into relying entirely on Apple as a middle man so that they can't cut Apple out of any transactions.
The cynical part of me sees this as an "Oh Shit!" reaction to businesses starting to circumvent the App Store.
If Apple can make everybody on a iPhone dependent upon their single-sign-on, they can threaten businesses with access to it later.
We are a B2B SAAS company offering analytics and marketing data. We wanted to offer our customer the ability to have a free app to interact with our service on their phone. We wanted our customers to subscribe on the web but not using in-app subscriptions.
We are unable to release this app on the AppStore until we change our whole payment/subscription/billing stack to support Apple subscription system and agree to give them 30% / 15% of our revenues on those users (this is more than we pay for AWS, comparatively).
Keep in mind that a good chunk of of revenues comes from custom plans, so I don't even know how that would work with Apple system.
So much for not forcing developers to do anything.
Are you sure that you’re interpreting the guidelines correctly? Lots of apps serve content related to subscriptions/digital purchases that are signed up for on the web (Netflix, Prime Video, etc.). Or are you trying to use the app as an acquisition channel?
It does not matter how we interpret the guidelines. The fact is that our app has been developed and tested, but was rejected by the app store reviewer citing this reason.
We believe we fall under the exception of "business databases" which are exempted from this restriction, but the reviewer does not believe so. Guess who won.
We are not trying to use the app as an acquisition channel, we don't believe our customers would discover our service through an app store search. We want to make it more easy for our current customers to view their data on a mobile device, the app is pretty simple, coded in react native and also available on the play store.
What was their specific rejection reason? Generally the rule is you can offer a service paid for elsewhere if you don't link to it and don't tell people you can pay elsewhere.
I have apps on my phone that accept payment only on the web.
Can you release the app using enterprise distribution? While not ideal, this will at least allow your customers to use your app instead of getting nothing.
Enterprise distribution is meant just for internal use of the company using it and distributing to customers via that method is exactly why Facebook and Google had their Apple enterprise services disabled a few months ago (although I’m sure they resolved their issues with Apple to get them enabled again)
Netflix offers subscription through the app as well. If you offer those and do not advertise your other channels, you are allowed to publish. The important part here is that you have to offer the same subscriptions at the same price between your web version and your in-app version.
But this would require a significant amount of work on our side to support both web and mobile subscription. We do not expect to get any new business straight from the mobile app, we just want to offer an additional free service to our existing and future customers.
It would take us at least 2 to 3 man-month to rework our billing stack so that Apple has a chance to get 30% on some subscription. Which they won't since we really doubt B2B customers will subscribe to $2k+ yearly contracts using in-apps purchases. So it's really spending all that time/effort so that the Apple reviewer feels OK can safely check the little box on his list next to "in-app policy" :-(
> The important part here is that you have to offer the same subscriptions at the same price between your web version and your in-app version.
That can't be true, SoundCloud offers differing prices between their Go+ on their website and app store. $9.99 and $12.99. They even tell you if you sign-up through their website instead of the app store you get a "discount".
I’m pretty sure you’re mistaken about this. Apple can be sticklers about ensuring that if you offer a way to sign up for the service in the app, you must support App Store subscriptions, but there are a lot of SaaS companies with free apps for subscribers. You just can’t offer a path to signing up from the app if you don’t want to pay apple.
You absolutely, 100% can handle billing completely outside of Apple's infrastructure and have your app be a "Reader app," to use Apple's term for such apps. Apple just posted a document[0] that lists Amazon Kindle, Netflix, Audible, and Spotify as examples of this.
You seem very confident about your understanding of things, but you seem to have misidentified the exact cause of your rejection.
We are writing to let you know the results of your appeal for your app, XXX.
The App Review Board evaluated your app and determined that the original rejection feedback is valid. Your app does not comply with:
Guideline 3.1.1 - Business - Payments - In-App Purchase
We continue to find that your app offers a subscription with a mechanism other than the in-app purchase API.
While we understand that the app reads data, it does not fall into any of the categories listed in guideline 3.1.3 for reader apps:
3.1.3(a) “Reader” Apps: Apps may allow a user to access previously purchased content or content subscriptions (specifically: magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, video, access to professional databases, VoIP, cloud storage, and approved services such as classroom management apps), provided that you agree not to directly or indirectly target iOS users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase, and your general communications about other purchasing methods are not designed to discourage use of in-app purchase
We hope you will consider making the necessary changes to be in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines and will resubmit your revised binary.
Best regards,
XXX
App Review Board
--- END ---
So unless you are in one of those listed categories, it does not work. Don't know why we can't be considered to be a professional database tho.
This is totally incorrect. If you have an app on Apple store and sell subscripttions through your website, or other means, Apple forces you to sell the same subscriptions through their store.
I use Spotify, FreeAgent, Toggl, Zoom, Pipedrive, Asana and Trello (plus Basecamp previously) on my iOS devices - and pay for all of those through the respective websites without any option to pay in the App Store.
(Edit: I know Spotify used to have an option for it but they dropped that and I never used it anyway)
Apple's strategy is simple because they had no strategy. They're pretty far behind with software and had no real cloud offering besides iCloud. They're doubling down on what they can do which is to convince people to avoid moving their life online.
In reality, I don't think people will go back to Cloud 1.0 but at least Apple will keep companies in check while they rot away to oblivion.
Examples? They are a platform vendor and have done no worse than other companies when it comes to their platform. Sure macOS has stagnated somewhat, but so have nearly all desktop platforms. Windows 10 started gaining momentum only when Microsoft realized that they had no scope in mobile space and had to save the last fort they had left. And to be honest, I do not consider Windows 10 to be massively superior to macOS. There is a reason they are building a Frankenstein's Monster by grafting a Linux kernel on top of Windows.
And iOS, despite its problem, can't be considered as worse than Android -- the later has its own problems.
At this point, OS platforms are as good as they are going to get. Barring a paradigm shift in computing, all we are going to see are incremental improvements. And IMO, that is not a bad thing. I, for one, do not want to see an interface redesign every other year.
> no real cloud offering besides iCloud.
That is like saying Google and Microsoft have no cloud offering besides Google Drive and OneDrive respectively. Or are you talking about GCP/Azure? If so, how is that relevant? Apple, unlike the other two, remains a consumer focused company with limited investment into enterprise.
> In reality, I don't think people will go back to Cloud 1.0 but at least Apple will keep companies in check while they rot away to oblivion.
What does that even mean?
> They're doubling down on what they can do which is to convince people to avoid moving their life online.
> That they can get away with this arm-twisting as "privacy" is to give credit to their brand positioning.
I think most EU Advertising Control Boards would verdict that Apple's privacy claims are misleading and therefore against the applicable Advertising Law.
> I think most EU Advertising Control Boards would verdict that Apple's privacy claims are misleading and therefore against the applicable Advertising Law.
I think not. From the horses mouth[1]:
Since the directive on unfair commercial practices (2005/29/EC) is in place, the misleading and comparative advertising directive has been applied only to business-to-business (B2B) relations concerning misleading advertising.
In this verdict [0] of 18-02-2019 the Dutch Advertising Board came to the verdict Misleading "is de uiting misleidend en daardoor oneerlijk in de zin van artikel 7 NRC.". Are you stating that the Misleading verdict can not been given in EU countries in B2C advertisements?
Add country to the equation, and you can easily add another 20-50 years into the already 20+ you mention.
Take India, for example.
-- The infrastructure is poor.
-- Drivers ignore rules to suit their convenience.
-- A lot of people depend on driving for their livelihood. Union minister, Nitin Gadkari, has already made it clear that they will not let tech that affects the livelihood of so many people come in and take jobs. Most governments that rely on the vote bank of poorer sections of the society will not dare to move against this mandate.
-- The preferred and most popular mode of transportation is still two-wheelers. I don't see anyone building self-driving two bikes. That rules out almost half of the Indian population's transportation
I don't think India will be ready for another 50 years to have fully self-driving vehicles.
The poor infrastructure could work to their advantage, they could build it to suit new applications. In the West we have a huge legacy infrastructure that is hard to deal with. It’s somewhat similar to the way Africa skipped traditional telecommunications and went straight to mobile.
Conjusted cities like Bangalore and reeling under bad city planning. Adding a self-driving vehicle is not going to be of much help.
The govt does not have money to spend on road repairs. Corruption at the contract level is rampant. Putting 1+1, I doubt India will use it to their advantage.
China on the other hand has horrible traffic problems and no where to build new roads in its most dense cities. They also have an autocratic government that can say “no more manual driven cars on or inside the 4th ring road” to optimize road usage.
In my city in Europe, my average speed is 23 km/h but I rarely go less than 40, more often 60-70 - meaning that I wait a lot, and I'm alone in the car. Yes, shared autonomous cars would help my city a lot.
Maybe TomMarius means that autonomous vehicles could negotiate intersections without stopping. No traffic lights required, only rules of precedence. It's going to be a slow procession but maybe the average speed would increase.
I'm not sure how that would mix with pedestrian crossings. In some dense areas there would be a non stop flow of people walking across the street and cars wouldn't be able to move.
The cars can work together to reduce riding distances, move faster in tandem when going in a green light, and so on. They virtually make the road much wider by eliminating human inefficiency in driving.
Curious to know why you decided to take a pay cut.
And you mentioned that you lied during the interview regarding your salary. In India, companies usually ask for 3 months salary slip as proof. Does it not happen in the country where you work?
I was laid off from the $40,000 job due to downsizing, then I spent a few months job hunting, so I was extremely happy about getting a new job, regardless of the salary.
Lying about my salary was a huge gamble, I guess. But since the FAANGs are based in the US and I wasn't, I was counting on them not asking for the IRS tax returns since I obviously didn't have one.
I am a product manager and I have been at both ends of the spectrum.
Case #1: Only product manager for the entire company. Spend all day trying to understand what's the most important thing to do for the current sprint. Comes out with nothing.
Case #2: One of the several product managers trying to find something to do to show to our boss.
Google simply wants to build a walled garden which it controls. The whole point of AMP was to speed up sites on slow networks. Increasingly, I am seeing AMP even on extremely fast networks. Why?
I have been a hands-on marketer who has handled multi-million dollar campaigns every month. Apart from the post being slightly self-promotional (a pitch to hire the author as a consultant), I strongly feel this is not the way to hire your first marketing person.
This is pretty much like saying your first tech hire should be a VP of Engineering who can roll up their sleeves and do front-end and back-end and data-infra and create neural networks. Sure, maybe they can do it. But how good a job do you think he will do overall?
The first marketing hire, especially when you don't really know how to hire a marketing person, is going to be a gamble - no matter what the experience of the person is or what level of success the person has achieved in the previous company. I have hired very successful hands-on marketers who have failed terribly because the dynamics of the company changes. So does the target audience, the message, etc.
Often times, most marketers will take credit for the success their team achieved. For e.g. if you ask what was the metrics you handled, they'd most likely share the team metrics that was a collective responsibility and give you numbers based on that. You need deep experience to see through these claims.
Also, the first hire you make almost always needs to be tactical unless you have a large budget. But even tactical markets cannot do anything unless you have enough marketing budgets. Also, the medium of promotion is important. FB marketing is very different from LinkedIn marketing. Both of them differ from AdWords as well. These are almost entirely different from content networks like Outbrain and Taboola. Oh did I talk to you about DSPs?
Unless you know which medium you will be using to promote, you cannot hire a specialist. And there's no one who is going to be equally skilled in all channels. I have seen marketers waste tens of thousands of dollars because they wanted to try a new channel which they had no idea to optimize.
In short, don't think following this guide is going to help you make the right hire. Unless you are a marketer yourself, most likely you will make the wrong hire.
If I were to hire a marketer for a startup and I cannot spend time hand-holding the person, I'll just hire someone who has some experience running organic as well as paid campaigns and is willing to experiment and learn. Marketing is mostly a function of trial and error. So hire someone who is willing to do this.
I deleted my Facebook account more than 2 years ago. Installed Instagram to test what the fuss was about. But uninstalled it in a day.
The thing that's still Facebook and major part of my life is WhatsApp. Chit chats, group discussions, and calls with family back home all happen through WhatsApp.
Couldn't transition to other apps because most people in my family and friends circle don't really care about privacy or data security. They prefer convenience.
Without them switching, it's going to be hard for me to switch.
> Couldn't transition to other apps because most people in my family and friends circle don't really care about privacy or data security. They prefer convenience.
What's wrong with phone calls and SMS? Granted they're not more secure, but at least they're not Facebook. I don't know any WhatsApp users, so I'm unaware of the advantage.
My social circles use it because it provides a consistent experience. Some have androids, and some have iPhones. When you have an all iPhone group chat, things work rather well. Liking different texts, animations, etc work well. But when you add a non-iPhone to the mix, the texts are sent sms-style, so you get messages that say "Sam liked X's comment!".
It's easier for everyone to use WhatsApp, because that platform provides a consistent experience. Also I can search messages in WhatsApp, I can't find this in iMessage.
Phone calls need to be in real time while Whatsapp chat can be read when you are free. Group SMS does not work because I am not aware of such functionality in Android.
During group discussions (like say planning a trip), we often share screenshots/images of hotels and other services for groups to vote on. These things are not possible with SMS or calls.
In India, most people I know have stopped using SMS altogether. Even I have stopped looking at SMS mostly because all the SMS I get is either an OTP (10%), a transactional message (10%), or a marketing message/SPAM (80%).
The last time I sent someone a personal message (or someone sent me one) using SMS was probably 2 years ago.
I've been happy as a clam to delete my Facebook and Instagram accounts over the last couple of years, and, like you, WhatsApp is a necessity. I spend 10+ months a year abroad, and WhatsApp has taken over as the default mode of communication. You don't ask for someone's phone number any more, you ask for their WhatsApp.
I wonder what it will take for WhatsApp to be dethroned? Perhaps a massive data leak, or proof that their e2e encryption has been knowingly compromised to gather data for Facebook advertising.
The point is, everyone is moving to medium because they have great UX plus they already have an in0built audience. But what happens when they have to start making money? We all know what happened to Facebook pages.
They want to retain control over their customers; at the same time, force the developers into relying entirely on Apple as a middle man so that they can't cut Apple out of any transactions.
This way, Apple gets their cut and user's get some level of privacy.
That they can get away with this arm-twisting as "privacy" is to give credit to their brand positioning.