We had a paid chat app for social media celebrities/models to earn money chatting with their fans years back. Apple argued that despite a human being doing the work it 'took place in the app' so that makes it a 'digital service'. That means we had to accept IAP and of course pay them 30%. Made it impossible to to pay our influencers fairly.
One of the many silly rejections we had was due to the images on our influencers profiles being too sexy despite being linked through the Instagram API. After explaining they were the same as you can find in the Instagram app we were told we had to actively censor them anyway. Shame on us for not being as big as Instagram, right?
After a year of making less margin from our own business than Apple they concluded paid chat was no longer appropriate for the app store and decided to just put us out of business one morning. Meanwhile, tons of other apps with the same functionality and far more sexualized are alive and doing well.
It can't be easy making every developer happy while curating the tidal wave of apps coming in each day, but it was a really soul crushing experience for us.
Your comments about you not being as big as Instagram are the reason I really hate apple. I've noticed their push for only the top of the line apps or their own stuff for years and it has completely soured me of them. They only cater to people with money. Apple crushes innovation worse than government regulation right now. All the apps I see on the app store are major corporations. There is hardly anything by indie or single devs anymore. Android it kinda exists but Google takes the "promote the moneymakers more" approach. I just wish apple would stop being a SAAS model company and return to making great hardware again. The simple fact alone that it took them 5 years to remove butterfly keyboards from the market along with 3 years to even acknowledge they were broken and offer free repairs shows they don't care about their users at all.
I was an Apple fanboy for 15 years. But they seem to be doing their level best to alienate pro customers. Over the last five years I’ve endured a comedic run of Apple Hardware failures (a catastrophic failure at least every 6 months). The response from Apple suggests this is nothing exceptional or that they simply just don’t care. I believe it’s the latter, I mean they’ve got billions of other customers. This arrogance that inevitably festers when a company is on top for so long.
But history has shown companies like this fall from grace once a critical mass of once devoted customers go elsewhere. I hope I’m wrong and Apple wakes up before this happens.
I thought there was no alternative to the Apple ecosystem that wouldn’t drive me crazy (Windows) or cost me in productivity. But with my 2017 MacBook Pro dead (again) and no access to Apple service due to Pandemic, I took out an old Thinkpad T420 and installed Linux Mint. It installed perfectly, the keyboard is epic compared to MBP and I’m productive.
Now I’m happy because I have an effective alternative to Apple. Once my MBP is fixed I will sell it. And wave goodbye to Apple.
It is just another lock in, there are 20M+ registered iOS Developers, I am not even sure if this is 20M individuals or group account meaning number could be even larger. But that is 20M out of the 100M Active Mac users are iOS developers. ( Since you have to use a Mac to develop for iOS )
That is at least 20M lock in due to iOS. Added to many more developers have their Machine paid by company I wont be surprised if there are many more software developers on Mac platform. ( They dont care about the price of the machine nor how long it takes to repair )
That is one reason why Apple, after years of announcing the Mac User Satisfaction rate is no longer doing so in their latest conference and investor meeting. Their growth of Active Mac User has also slowed down dramatically, and hasn't reported a new Active Mac user number for quite a long time.
What all these suggest is that Apple only took action with the Keyboard and MacBook Pro 16" when they saw the sales were slowing. It wasn't the keyboard were not good enough or customers were unhappy with their Machine that brought them action. It was the sales number that did the talk. No one in Apple now has the product / user mindset whether something is good or not. The only product person is gone. And that was Steve Jobs.
Absolutely. After Steve Jobs died what did we get with Apple? The literal.exact.same.products.every.year...
The newest ipad? Copy of Android. The butterfly keys? DOA and they waited until consumers realized they made dud products at absurd prices. New macbook air? WTF kind of innovation is that? You literally are just reusing the brand name. Also 128gb hard drives as a standard? Still?! That is the biggest joke in the world seeing as the newest macbook has a 4k display. 4k files raw files can be like 50gb's at times! Thats half the drive space!
Apple can get bent at this point. The simple fact that I constantly have to tell it I'm okay with installing a third party app outside of the app store goes to show they do not care what I like about computing. They just want to funnel me through a path to make them money. This is why I'm a staunch advocate for OSS and Linux and always will be, even with their faults.
Under Cook they've become a miserly penny-pinching company with a bullying arrogant edge and a consistent record of underdelivering on technology and reliability.
I still prefer their products to anything made by MS (and Linux is not an option for pro media reasons), but buying Apple has become less about delight and more about holding my nose while feeling like I'm being gouged for a product that is likely to have at least a few serious issues.
"Linux itself is ready for production". I first used Linux back in the early 90s, no x-windows, just shells, which was kind of normal at the time. Then moved to Windows and lived in that ecosystem from 3.x all the way to Windows XP. I switched to Apple after Balmer led Microsoft through a string of puzzling product decisions and seemingly anti-consumer / customer patterns. Which seems a lot like Apple since Jobs (Under Cook).
Linux ready for Production. Sure feels like the perfect time.
I'm 100% with you on every point. I love linux, but while media options exist, they are a royal pain to get to work, or do the things you need them too. Wine is not an option and is just irritating at times. Hardware and driver issues are a pain.
Apart from their phones, they make little I want any more.
I built a Ryzen desktop a while ago, since there was no way I was paying what they want for an iMac Pro or Mac Pro, and I needed a decent GPU, lots of cores and memory and no thermal throttling.
Switched to Linux with a tiling WM (bspwm), since I’m a backend engineer (Go/Rust), not iOS. I also have Windows 10 installed, and honestly, it’s fine as well with WSL2.
Apple needs to realise Swift is not going anywhere except for the iOS/macOS niche, and consider general developers again, but so far Microsoft is doing a much better job of that, and I don’t hold out much hope, Apple have missed their window and are returning to their closed off locked down comfort zone. Not really sure they left, but it seemed like it for a while.
For me Windows 10 + WSL does the trick. I have access to the largest library of desktop apps while being able to run *nix tools if needed.
I can use whatever hardware I need, I can upgrade the hardware with ease, I can connect almost any periferals with ease.
The downside would be if you prefer OS X way of doing things. For me software I use matters more than the underlying OS, as long as the OS doesn't stay in my way.
> "All the apps I see on the app store are major corporations. There is hardly anything by indie or single devs anymore."
not discounting apple's hand in all this, but that's mostly an instance of the caveat emptor problem (and paradox of choice too)--how do you know who to trust in a market?
not that it's always right, but apple and many consumers use size as a proxy for quality, a good enough, but probably not optimal, result in most cases. conversely, it's hard to evaluate small developers with no reputation. then you bring in reviews and review sites, and the additional trust issues around that.
any curation is bound to be imperfect (because humans and our systems are imperfect) but no curation at all is often even worse (paradox of choice and all). the path to a better system is not trying to get it exactly right the first time but having swift and visible procedures when it's wrong.
One example that is burning in my mind the past week: VNC Viewer iOS 3.9.0. A VNC client is so trivial to make, there is no good reason that the app store shouldn’t be flooded with free, or at least low cost, good solutions. When I look, all I see is VNC Viewer, bad choices, and expensive choices. Real VNC decided to make VNC Viewer iOS require the user to watch an ad prior to connecting to a non-Real VNC server. How did we get here? Because Apple assumed the big players will behave better. But they won’t. We don’t expect them to because they have weight to throw around. Apple’s strategy is not trying to maximize the user experience. It’s not even trying to keep the user experience acceptable.
That’s an absurd cost for problem with such a simple solution. I bit the bullet with an app called Jump, which has as many features as I’d ever want for this. I wasn’t happy putting up $8 for it, in principle, but at least it isn’t a choice between an ad or a subscription.
I mean they’re almost certainly targeting businesses for whom $20 for a lifetime license might as well be free.
Charging that much is also a way to reduce support costs since anyone who will fork over that much for a VNC viewer probably knows what they’re doing or has an IT department.
Good software isn't cheap. I wish more things were simple $20 buy-once apps instead of having to chose between a broken open source app, a data-stealing subscription service or an app that's free but with ads everywhere.
On the contrary, great software is free. This is true now more than it ever has been in the past. Real thinking they can charge for something that is done just as well as them for free just shows that they are willfully ignoring the market.
i doubt apple is intentionally stifling competition there, but rather, there's not enough market opportunity to drive costs down via competition. as a result, real vnc is acting like a monopolist in their little corner of the market.
it was that way for windows desktops 10+ years ago, when i last really used a vnc client.
Ahem well, random story time, I also used VNC about 10+ years ago. I was visiting a friend, and somehow we ended up wondering how many open VNC servers were still out on the Internet. Fast forward some hours, we had put together a scanner (Perl) that connected to default VNC port and saved the bitmap to disk... and let it loose.
That was amusing; ran it for weeks. There were a few desktops and such, but the majority was camera monitoring systems from shops, kiosks, office buildings, streets and what not, some manufacturer clearly didn't do their due diligence... Found a whole bunch of industrial equipment HMI systems, although we could never figure out what it was, something with hot pipes... Some stuff looked like astronomy, some like fishing, a lot we just had no clue.
I wonder what it would look like if repeated today... ?
The next person who does this: please report the config problem to the camera vendor, then make the issue public after 90 days (or other reasonable timeline) if the vendor does not respond. This lowers the chance of future adversaries scraping images of the public from default-open camera feeds.
Yeah and their new curated app store makes it impossible for people to find anything that they're not promoting. I have a health app and it takes me 5-10 minutes to find the health and fitness section now to see what the top apps are.
So exactly how should Apple make it easy to find your app over the other 5 million apps? It’s the app developers responsibility to gain an audience and market themselves. It’s that way on any platform or the “open web”.
I think the point is that they claim they deserve their 30% because they promote you, but if they aren't actually doing that, why do they deserve their 30%?
If you have to market the whole thing on your own and find your own audience, what value are they providing? Hosting the infrastructure? Fine, let me pay a per download price or a monthly hosting fee. Or better yet, let me host it on my own infrastructure.
Verifying the security of the app? The customers should be paying for that, not the developers.
That's the issue here. They want you to pay a ransom but they don't actually provide any value for that ransom.
How are they suppose to “promote” 5 million+ apps? Apple never claimed promotion they claimed access. Do physical retail stores actively promote your SKU over the thousands of other products?
> How are they suppose to “promote” 5 million+ apps?
I don't know, in theory that's why they get 30%, to figure that out.
> Apple never claimed promotion they claimed access.
From their website [0]: "the all-new Mac App Store beautifully showcases your apps and makes them even easier to find."
> Do physical retail stores actively promote your SKU over the thousands of other products?
They most certainly do. If you've ever worked in retail you'd be familiar with the daily restocking sheet, where we had to move certain products to the eye level shelf and other ones down.
Look at your supermarket. The end caps change all the time. This is a combination of those brands paying for those placements and the store putting high margin popular items up front.
But the point is that stores accept different payments from different vendors for different levels of promotion.
I don't know, in theory that's why they get 30%, to figure that out.
So what platform has 4.5 million products and can showcase them all?
They most certainly do. If you've ever worked in retail you'd be familiar with the daily restocking sheet, where we had to move certain products to the eye level shelf and other ones down.
So some products get showcased and some languish in obscurity. Apple also showcases a few apps....
And those products that get showcased on the end cap pay extra. You can also (sadly) pay extra to run search based ads in the App Store.
You keep saying the same irrelevant thing. It doesn’t matter how hard it is to showcase 5M apps, /if you’re taking 30% of the cut from all of them, in exchange for promoting them/.
Fraud at scale is still fraud. This isn’t a difficult concept.
They aren't taking a 30% cut to "promote" you. They are taking the cut and providing billing services like credit card processing. They also provide access to your app and apis for you to connect and use phone features. They also host your app binary and provide update services. But the main reason they charge 30% is because they can. If they offered no value for that 30%, then no one would pay for it.
I agree it's too much. But they do offer something for that 30%.
I don't expect them to promote anything, back in the day a good app could get some initial traction, make it to the top 1000 apps in a category and move up the charts based on usage and good reviews.
That's not possible anymore. It's a known fact that the only way to make it on the app store these days is to blow half a million dollars on a burst ad campaign to get a large initial volume of downloads. Other option is to have the number of "App Store Managers", who decide what gets featured, and that option is only really available to top VC firms and large companies.
Again there is an existence proof that isn’t true. Marco Arment and David “Underscore” Smith are well known indie developers who are often featured on the App Store.
They could go back to the way it used to be, when you could open up the app store, see all of the categories than be able to see the top few hundred apps in each category, ranked by popularity. Now they have a manually curated feed of 1-2 apps per day, mostly pushing large companies like Nike or UNO. If they want to curate they should at least personalize the recommendations to each user, their current suggestions are full of apps for kids.
Back in the day if I wanted to find a good navigation app I could open up the app store, press on the navigation category and get a list of top navigation apps, determined by usage. Now it's:
open app > press "Apps" tab > scroll 10 pages worth of content down to "Top Categories" > press a small blue text button "See All" > select "Navigation" > scroll past hiking, charging and bike sharing recommended sections > find "Top Free" section > press "See All" > browse top apps
From talking to a lot of users of my app I guarantee you that 90% of people never make it past the hand picked suggestions that Apple decides to show everyone. To make things worse their search is completely broken, I just searched "maps" and got:
0. Paid Ad for Google Maps
1. Apple Maps
2. "Brainstorm and Mind-Map Your Ideas" ("Story")
3. Google Maps
4. Google Photos
5. Facebook Messenger
6. Gmail
7. Waze
A new mapping app has no shot at getting discovered the way Waze did back in the day unless it raises millions of dollars and blows all of it on Apple, Google and Facebook ads.
Now they have a manually curated feed of 1-2 apps per day, mostly pushing large companies like Nike or UNO
Marco Arment is a one man shop who saw success with both InstaPaper before he sold it and now Overcast. Overcast is often featured in the App Store.
David “Underscore” Smith is another indie Mac developer who is frequently featured in the iOS App Store and the Watch App Store. Not to mention apps like Carrot Weather and Dark Skies.
On another note what shot does an indie musician have to being successful?
m_ke's point is that you shouldn't have to be hand-picked by Apple like that to be successful. Apps that people rate highly and download more should have the benefit of being on the front page.
open app > press "Apps" tab > scroll 10 pages worth of content down to "Top Categories" > press a small blue text button "See All" > select "Navigation" > scroll past hiking, charging and bike sharing recommended sections > find "Top Free" section > press "See All" > browse top apps
Maybe you and m_ke are using different versions of iOS.
Open App Store. This is what the screen looks like.
Apps
Watch With Family
Disney+
Stream Pixar’s Latest hit
[ Screen shot of Onward]
Popular Apps. [See All]
Today | Games | Apps | Arcade | Search
If you click on Games you see “essential game picks”.
If you click on Apps, you see “Popular Apps”.
The entire issue with “popular free apps” is that it never gives other apps the opportunity to gain exposure and the same apps stay popular for years at a time. Apps like Facebook would get exposure forever.
>So exactly how should Apple make it easy to find your app over the other 5 million apps
I mean at least make App Store Search works would be a great place to start 11 years after App Store was introduced?
Part of me just want Apple to give me a dump of all the Apps Information to shove it inside Elastic Search and see if I get better results by default than the current App Store searching. That is how bad it is. ( To add insult to injury they decided to add top placement bids to App Store )
Constantly seeing Apple Arcade (their paid service) at the top of the App Store app is annoying, unfair, and unnecessary. They even have a 'sign up for Apple TV+' at the top of the Settings app IIRC. Apple already controls/owns the ecosystem. There's no reason they need to spam the system with ads for their own apps/services.
Yeah seriously. Also they've messed with the podcast app so much I can't use it anymore. They only promote those that pay them basically. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find "new" podcasts? It's virtually non-existent on their app. 7 years ago, you could filter by new and you had a larger variety of categories. Now, if they aren't doing an ad ready 10 times per 1 hour episode, it's not at the top page.
Kind of ironic given their past "Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes..." messaging, though I'm not sure that was ever real.
My mbp is 9 years old and still doing relatively well, however it's nearing it's end of life and my replacement of choice is system 76. MS is an ok alternative, but unnecessary. And osx no longer innovates. They just hoard and protect their own interests.
I don't feel the app store promotes only major corporations. I don't check it all that often but those editorials seem to have plenty of independent apps.
So if Apple is “crushing innovation” where are all of the successful Android only apps?
All the apps I see on the app store are major corporations. There is hardly anything by indie or single devs anymore.
Overcast is the most popular third party podcast player on iOS and it is written by one person. David Smith has made a living on the App Store for years as a solo developer.
But how is the power law that you see in the App Store any different than in music, books, podcasts or on the web?
Make no mistake, Google isn't any better these days. We've got a pretty large app and didn't just get the app revoked but our whole freaking account suspended over minor wording issues in the meta descriptions. Note we're not exactly small with six-digit MAUs. Google doesn't care about your business either if you're not Snapchat.
With more critical services and partnerships depending on Google, we're currently choosing our battles, even though I'd love to take this out in public.
That doesn't take away that Apple still takes the crown. Over the years, we've been revoked for doing some basic app behavior, then for not doing it anymore and lastly for doing it again (sorry that I can't go into specifics).
We're not doing anything remotely shady, just basic item comparison for consumers.
If you're relying on any of the app stores for your business these days, you're screwed. Both major ecosystems are unreliable, inconsistent dictatorships by now.
It's really time to unite as app developers and take out those big anti-trust guns.
I wouldn’t call Firefox “innovative” it’s just another web browser.
It’s not exactly winning over hearts and minds on the other platforms where it’s available - Windows, Macs, or Android.
And “successful” as in “makes decent money”.
It’s the authors choice to use a license that’s its incompatible with Apple’s policies. You are free to have open source software and publish it on github and run it on iOS.
Also if you are the legal rights holder of the emulated system, you are free to distribute your emulator with games - see Sega.
No, in a capitalist system a product is successful when it’s profitable.
Even if you are just looking for ubiquity and not looking for profitability, Firefox doesn’t exactly win there either.
You should be able to find one worldwide or at least nationwide mass market success that is successful on Android that isn’t available on Apple.
iOS has about the same marketshare in mobile that Macs have in the PC market. You can find plenty of Windows only successful software that is massively profitable. Where is the same software for Android?
> You can find plenty of Windows only successful software that is massively profitable. Where is the same software for Android?
The software that is Windows-only isn't the most successful stuff that everybody has heard of (e.g. Office, Adobe, Chrome), that's the stuff available for both because it has enough demand to justify development even for smaller platforms.
The Windows-only applications are the ones with a niche. It's the control application for some piece of industrial equipment, or some line-of-business application, and then you need Windows because you have that equipment or you're in that line of business. And it's the same thing for Android. They can only justify development for one platform so they choose the most popular one. They're just not apps you'll have heard of if you aren't in that niche.
It's even moreso for Android because many types of applications are prohibited by Apple. Like what's the best BitTorrent app for iPhone? File manager? Remote desktop? Screen recording?
Even the popular apps that exist on both platforms aren't as good on iOS. Firefox has to use Safari under the hood. Maybe that doesn't matter to you. Until the "Firefox" you want to run is Tor Browser, which is designed to resist client fingerprinting in ways that Safari isn't, and then the inability to use that on iOS compromises your security. Similarly, the way Signal does backups on Android (i.e. with its characteristically diligent security properties) isn't allowed on iOS, so it doesn't support backups on iOS at all. So even for apps that exist on both, on iOS they're not as good.
It's even moreso for Android because many types of applications are prohibited by Apple. Like what's the best BitTorrent app for iPhone? File manager? Remote desktop? Screen recording?
There are plenty of Remote Desktop apps for the iPhone. There are also screen recording apps for the iPhone - there is an API for it. It’s used by Zoom.
What policies are in place that don’t allow Signal to do backups using its own service - something that other apps do?
And you’re worried about “security” but you want a File Browser to have unfettered access to your data? It’s a feature that third party apps can only access files outside of their own sandbox that you explicitly give them permission to.
No company wants to deal with the hassle and legality of bit torrent. Most people aren’t using to “download Linux ISOs”. I’m definitely not.
But before as far as bit torrent, my use case is starting and downloading things on my computer from my phone and adding them to my Plex library. I can do that by pairing my mobile browser to Vuze and going to remote.vuze.com.
There are plenty of Windows only consumer apps - especially games. Even from Microsoft, Access and Publisher are Windows only and are included with Office 365.
Right because Google - the number one most visited page on the internet has a lesser ability to market than Apple.
What do you think made Chrome so popular?
People have been saying that marketing is the only reason that Apple is successful since the iPod. Are other companies that incompetent that they could figure marketing out in almost 20 years?
> There are plenty of Remote Desktop apps for the iPhone.
Not screen sharing, something equivalent to Windows Remote Desktop Services or X11 forwarding, where your device acts as a thin client for an application running on a remote server. It's expressly prohibited by the Apple guidelines, presumably because any such client would allow someone to compete with the app store by using remote apps. But it's also useful for other things, like keeping all your data on your company's trusted servers instead of on a device that could be lost or stolen.
> What policies are in place that don’t allow Signal to do backups using its own service - something that other apps do?
It doesn't use a service because the entire point is to not have all your data in the hands of a third party service. On Android it stores the backup in the filesystem which you copy off the device via USB.
> And you’re worried about “security” but you want a File Browser to have unfettered access to your data? It’s a feature that third party apps can only access files outside of their own sandbox that you explicitly give them permission to.
"It's not a bug, it's a feature!"
There should obviously be a permission required to do that, but if the user wants to use the app to view their files, they should be able to use the app to view their files.
This is the problem with Apple deciding everything for everybody. Some people have really stringent security requirements and don't want their data getting uploaded to a service, someone else wants a copy of all the data from every app to be backed up to some third party cloud service. But Apple restricts things to such an extent that you can't choose to do either one. One size fits none.
> No company wants to deal with the hassle and legality of bit torrent. Most people aren’t using to “download Linux ISOs”. I’m definitely not.
BitTorrent is not illegal, that isn't Apple's problem any more than it is with anything else anyway (what if someone pirates movies with Safari?), and "no company wants to deal with that hassle" is exactly the problem with putting the decision of what you can use your device for in the hands of a third party that isn't responsive to your needs.
> But before as far as bit torrent, my use case is starting and downloading things on my computer from my phone and adding them to my Plex library. I can do that by pairing my mobile browser to Vuze and going to remote.vuze.com.
Which is a fully generic counterargument, because you can make any app a web page and then do whatever you want on the web page. That's a total cheat when you're asking for things there are no iOS apps for.
> There are plenty of Windows only consumer apps - especially games.
There are plenty of Android only games, like Doom 3.
Not to mention all of the games that can be played in emulators on Android but not iOS because Apple doesn't allow emulators.
> Even from Microsoft, Access and Publisher are Windows only and are included with Office 365.
You must realize the equivalent to this would be Google apps for Android that don't exist on iOS, which there are several of.
Not screen sharing, something equivalent to Windows Remote Desktop Services or X11 forwarding, where your device acts as a thin client for an application running on a remote server. It's expressly prohibited by the Apple guidelines, presumably because any such client would allow someone to compete with the app store by using remote apps. But it's also useful for other things, like keeping all your data on your company's trusted servers instead of on a device that could be lost or stolen.
It doesn't use a service because the entire point is to not have all your data in the hands of a service. On Android it stores the backup in the filesystem which you copy off the device via USB
You know Apple supports standard USB storage devices now right?
There should obviously be a permission required to do that, but if the user wants to use the app to view their files, they should be able to use the app to view their files.
They can. It’s called the “Files” app. It’s built into iOS.
This is the problem with Apple deciding everything for everybody. Some people have really stringent security requirements and don't want their data leaving their device, someone else wants a copy of all the data from every app to be backed up to some third party cloud service. But Apple restricts things to such an extent that you can't choose to do either one.
You mean you can’t attach a standard USB device to iOS and the App Store data on it? You know that feature was added in iOS 13?
Which is a fully generic counterargument, because you can make any app a web page and then do whatever you want on the web page. That's total cheat when you're asking for things there are no iOS apps for
I thought the favorite Anti-
Apple talking point was that Apple forced everyone to create apps instead of using the “open web”?
There are plenty of Android only games, like Doom 3.
There is no official port for Android either. There is an unofficial port for iOS and Android....
You must realize the equivalent to this would be Google apps for Android that don't exist on iOS, which there are several of
How is the equivalent of anything? Microsoft has been writing software for Apple platforms since the original AppleSoft Basic in 1980.
> There is are existence proofs that you are wrong.
You have listed a bunch of screen sharing apps again. They're designed to let you view the screen of your PC or game console from your phone, not to let you run apps designed for phones remotely instead of running them on your phone (so that your data is never stored on your phone).
In theory you could probably use those apps to do that anyway since they use sufficiently generic protocols, but it would be quite risky to rely on the availability of expressly prohibited behavior for a workflow you require to actually continue to work.
In fact, that is a major risk of using an iPhone in general, because they can change the rules at any time and boot any app out of the store even if it's critically important for your workflow.
> They can. It’s called the “Files” app. It’s built into iOS.
No they can't, they have to use the "Files" app instead of the app they actually want to use. If it would do something the "Files" app can't do, now they can't do that.
> You know Apple supports standard USB storage devices now right?
How is that supposed to help if the app still can't write to the filesystem?
> I thought the favorite Anti- Apple talking point was that Apple forced everyone to create apps instead of using the “open web”?
I don't want to call this a straw man because I'm sure somebody has said it at some point, but that's a weak argument.
The web is like the lowest common denominator. It's universally available and in principle you can make it do anything (browsers are certainly Turing-complete), but then it's slower and uses ugly languages like javascript and is inherently client-server which is centralizing and terrible for privacy and offline availability etc. etc.
As far as I'm concerned the problem with what Apple is doing is that it makes it harder to have native apps that do what you want them to do which pushes more things to be crummy websites full of ad spam when they ought to be local apps that never contact an external server.
> There is no official port for Android either. There is an unofficial port for iOS and Android....
It's open source. "Official" isn't particularly relevant. What's relevant is that you don't need to be in a developer program to install it on your Android phone.
> How is the equivalent of anything? Microsoft has been writing software for Apple platforms since the original AppleSoft Basic in 1980.
You're asking for apps that are available on Android but not iOS. There are several of them from Google, but that hardly proves anything because Google makes Android. They have an obvious incentive to favor their own platform. Apps made by Microsoft that only run on Windows prove just as little for the same reason.
I don't know what you mean by 'just android', they get paid when people use the search bar. Apple does not allow other browsers, I think you have been told this elsewhere in this thread.
Apple does not deserve their unfair market position. They are bleeding small businesses dry and if they continue this, they need to be broken up. Same with Google and Android.
They can't make a phone and simultaneously control the app distribution. Things didn't work like this in the 90s and 00s.
I'm hoping there's a future the web can win. With WASM and full access to native APIs, we can build and distribute truly free apps without being overloarded by these giant monopolies trying to bleed us dry.
The government should mandate that apps work on all platforms, with the onus being on platform owners to make it work.
> I'm hoping there's a future the web can win. With WASM and full access to native APIs, we can build and distribute truly free apps without being overloarded by these giant monopolies trying to bleed us dry.
I'm hopeful about this too, but it seems Apple is consciously avoiding cannibalizing their developer program by giving too much API access. For example, despite Web Push being a standard for years now and supported by desktop Safari, not only is it not implemented on iOS Safari, other browsers are seemingly prevented from implementing it. Whole classes of PWA are eliminated by not having notification access (e.g. turn-based games).
With Google owning the web with Chromium, dictating web standards and monopolizing web site discovery trough Google search, that isn't exactly a bright future.
We need open standards, other browser vendors and more rendering engines. MS killed their web engine and Firefox doesn't have a great market share.
So should Amazon not be allowed to host the third party marketplace? Should the console makers not be allowed to have their own store? Should physical retail not be allowed to sell their own in house brands?
As far as things didn’t work like this is in the 90s, Atari had its own digital store in the 80s where you could buy games and have them downloaded over cable to a cartridge.
> So should Amazon not be allowed to host the third party marketplace?
People should be able to run their own distribution. It's the Internet and it's a simple problem. Companies need to stop dipping their fingers in the pie and offering little in recompense.
> Should the console makers not be allowed to have their own store?
There are three major gaming consoles, PC, mobile, self-distribution... lots of platforms with which to gain distribution. There are libraries and frameworks that let you write the game once and publish it to all platforms.
Gaming is a small sector compared to everything we run on our phones. Movies, finance, communication, dating. Apple and Google tax all of the commerce happening there. I'd much rather give that money to the government instead of helping these two build a deeper moat.
> Should physical retail not be allowed to sell their own in house brands?
They do this at a loss to aid negotiations for pricing and ensuring they get enough stock. It's complicated.
* People should be able to run their own distribution. It's the Internet and it's a simple problem. Companies need to stop dipping their fingers in the pie and offering little in recompense.*
So has Amazon stopped people from selling their stuff on their own website?
There are three major gaming consoles, PC, mobile, self-distribution... lots of platforms with which to gain distribution. There are libraries and frameworks that let you write the game once and publish it to all platforms.
There are also frameworks that help you publish to both mobile platforms. But just like cross platform games, you still need to own the development machines for the console or computer.
Movies, finance, communication, dating. Apple and Google tax all of the commerce happening there.
Most commerce happening there is done on the providers website. The client is on the mobile site. Apple nor Google get a cut.
They do this at a loss to aid negotiations for pricing and ensuring they get enough stock. It's complicated.
You really think store brands are sold at a loss and not a higher profit?
It seems like you have a point to make but it's not coming through. The comment you're replying to is proposing opening up the developer platforms to allow people to sell their own stuff.
> So has Amazon stopped people from selling their stuff on their own website?
Yes, along with google. By monopolizing search. You won't ever be able to find Bob's home store online when they push their own stores and paid ads on top of everything else.
Coming back to Apple, it definitely stopped people from selling their stuff. There is no way to load third-party apps on their platform besides the App Store. There is no way to provide payments (or even mention you sell stuff) without giving up 30% of your revenue.
Yes, along with google. By monopolizing search. You won't ever be able to find Bob's home store online when they push their own stores and paid ads on top of everything else.
This shows a severe lack of imagination. Everyone by definition can’t stand out via organic search. Should you really start a business if your only customer acquisition strategy is SEO and organic search? In MBA speak “What's your unfair advantage”?
And once again, there is an existence proof from dozens of companies that force you to pay for the service outside of the store to use the app. They aren’t just big companies. I mentioned before that the smallish B2B company I use to work at had an app on the store that required health systems to sign a six figure a year contract to use and Apple didn’t see a penny of it.
Speaking of which, I’ve worked for four small B2B companies that had sense enough to not put their customer acquisition destiny in Google’s hands. They actually had a sales force, a contact list, went to industry events, published in industry specific journals, made sure they appeared in the upper right of “Gartner’s Magic Quadrant”, etc.
It still amazes me how many excuses people make for not having a realistic customer acquisition strategy.
Even on the consumer side how many B2C companies have become successful by advertising on relevant podcasts?
This whole thread is about Apple & Google holding an unfair monopoly position and controlling distribution. Besides that being a lot more relevant for B2C, none of what you said goes against that (yes, Android still allows side-loading, riddled with warnings, only viable for business customers).
No point being successful in marketing if Apple decides to summarily remove your app from the store for no good reason at all.
So what about Mary, Sue, Becky and the dozens of other owners of Home Stores. All of them can’t hope to be discovered via organic search. Who starts a business without a customer acquisition strategy? Being found on Google organic is not a customer acquisition strategy. Who starts a business without an “unfair advantage”?
> So should Amazon not be allowed to host the third party marketplace?
The whole point is that they should. Why can't I buy iOS apps through Amazon? Or on a USB stick from Walmart or Gamestop like boxed software for Windows? Why can't I get it directly from the developer's website?
The problem isn't that Apple or Google has a store, it's that everybody should be able to have a store, without having to be the size of Apple or Google or Amazon.
Because the entire point of the App Store is the review process. But you do realize even physical games you buy for consoles have to be reviewed and approved by the console makers and they still get a cut?
> Because the entire point of the App Store is the review process.
So who is stopping you from buying all your apps from the App Store after they've gone through the review process? Why do you need to stop everybody else from choosing to do something different than you and having their iPhone apps reviewed by somebody else?
> But you do realize even physical games you buy for consoles have to be reviewed and approved by the console makers and they still get a cut?
That is indeed the same situation, and consoles should not be restricting competing app distribution methods either.
"One of the many silly rejections we had was due to the images on our influencers profiles being too sexy despite being linked through the Instagram API."
So outside Apples wall garden or the great firewall of Apple as you could liken it. I can understand that aspect as it would allow somebody to change the pic on Instagram and that would then come across upon their platform so the potential for something lewd and some media outlet would have the headline "Apple has dildo's showing on an their site accessible to children". So proactive PR management in some way but certainly a scenario that could play out and can appreciate that aspect. Equally, as a developer using public API's, I can totally appreciete the perspective that Instagrams T&C's wouldn't allow anything bad in this instances, and feel that censoring was already done and having to censor an API content when if that was needed then Instagram would alreay have that in place would make any dev grown in angst.
However, does appear that a censoring API setup for some public API's is a market that could be tapped. So whilst it may of seen bad on the face of it, it shows an opportunity awaiting to be tapped and with that - how did that all pan out (how did you solve that issue)?
I feel like what you're talking about gets really close to the Roth test and I can see how that might be a factor for Apple pulling your app but leaving others.
There's a lot of amateur porn stars on social media that call themselves models. There's a lot of models that aren't.
I don't know how you create an app where people pay money to chat to models with racy instagram photos and discriminate between who's making pornography and who's not.
Our app was quite clean and not taken down due to adult content creators, it was specifically the paid chat functionality they took issue with. And hey, I get it. It was a bit borderline. We took a risk with the business model. But that wasn't my issue it was the 30% fee that really killed us - bending the spirit of the rules to call a humans time chatting somehow a 'digital goods/service' to catch us in their IAP web. This stopped us from being able to pay our creators fairly and caused us to make less than Apple did from our own product after we paid creators. Creators expect more than the 70% so it makes it almost impossible to run this type of product/service on the app store.
Btw why hasn’t that business idea caught on more? Lots of people would love to talk to celebrities and celebrities like money. So why isn’t it a thing?
I bet lots of us would pay $20 to talk to Linus or guido for 5-10 minutes. Or a couple bucks for a quick text chat.
I’m guessing that celebrities can get much better rates than the $120 - $240 per hour you’re suggesting. I’d be surprised if even niche YouTube ‘stars’ couldn’t do better than that.
It seems like it’s a business model that doesn’t scale well.
Did you have an option to require account management on the website like Netflix, Hulu, etc. do to avoid the IAP fee? It’s not clear to me if small companies are allowed to do that.
Yes any company is allowed to do that. You can buy Udemy courses outside of the App Store. You have to buy access to ACloudGuru outside of the App Store.
So, first off, even when this is allowed, the UI experience sucks, as you aren't allowed to help the user make the purchase from the app: the user has to go hunting on Google for the idea they can make an external purchase.
> Apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase.
But like, while you might think it is allowed--due to the existence of some apps like Netflix and Udemy--those apps are in explicitly exempted content-catalog oriented product categories, such as movies and online education.
> 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.
This is the kind of answer from someone who speaks with actual experience. Most users are trained to just head straight to the App Store to download your product even when they discover your app on web so if theres no in app onboarding your funnel completely falls apart
In that case, how do you explain the dozens of apps that I can list personally that do require out of band subscriptions? This isn’t just major brands. One that comes to mind is ACloudGuru.
It's because Apple have either intentionally turned a blind eye to these companies or they have managed to sneak it past the app store review team. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ Section 3.1.1 In-App Purchase:
If you want to unlock features or functionality within your app, (by way of example: subscriptions, in-game currencies, game levels, access to premium content, or unlocking a full version), you must use in-app purchase. Apps may not use their own mechanisms to unlock content or functionality, such as license keys, augmented reality markers, QR codes, etc. Apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase.
So you're actually proving the point that their review system is neither fair nor consistent with your crusade in here. Also don't forget about survivorship bias. For every app you see that does this thousands of others got forced to use IAP during the review process.
So you’re saying that the app reviewers “overlooked” - Sling, DirecTVNow, Microsoft Office, Hulu Live TV (not regular Hulu), Youtube TV, Spotify, ACloudGuru, the Kindle App, ComicXology, Netflix, Plex, etc.
What’s more likely, your interpretation is wrong or reality?
It’s not just those. I worked for a B2B company before where we had contracts with major hospitals. You could download our app “for free” but you had to have an existing deal with our company.
There are also apps like Office, GSuite, and those from Adobe where you buy your license out of band.
Sometimes Apple doesn't notice and sometimes Apple makes explicit exceptions; however, such "treatment of Developers is neither fair nor consistent" (and is something you aren't really going to find out about until after you plunk down the development costs on your app, at which point Apple pretty much has you hostage). I have, to be very clear about this, been in a call with Apple App Store reviewers explicitly running my nose in this clause and then, when I am all "but but but what about XYZ???" they simply tell me they will add XYZ back to their review queue to see if it is in compliance and whether or not it should be removed from the Store.
(I just reread this comment and it is driving me crazy that I didn't catch the typo of "rubbing my nose in" as "running" and feel the need to leave a correction ;P.)
Not everything can and should be built on the web, of course, but I would not build a software business of any kind on the app store. If I were to do games I'd target consoles or Steam.
I had a similar experience except it was Google. Google outright killed the app and punished our developer account while Apple happily let it continue.
We tried distributing the apk and going through Amazon but it was fruitless. So now it’s just iOS and we have to explain why over and over and over again.
The tactics Apple employs are so outlandishly anticompetitive it’s almost comical. Sure, it’s not a smartphone monopoly, but in the iPhone app market, Apple reigns supreme - and it is a tyrannical reign.
It's a real stretch to suggest that Apple is a monopoly because they control their own platform. By that definition anyone who has a closed platform is operating a monopoly. Is Netflix a monopoly? Fiverr?
One of the principles of competition law is prevent a company from abusing a dominant position or to prevent a company from obtaining a dominant position through abuse. Apple does not have a dominant position.
We had a paid chat app for social media celebrities/models to earn money chatting with their fans years back. Apple argued that despite a human being doing the work it 'took place in the app' so that makes it a 'digital service'. That means we had to accept IAP and of course pay them 30%. Made it impossible to to pay our influencers fairly.
Or you could have forced users to subscribe outside of the App Store on your own website.....
You must have missed the part I said where Apple deemed paid chat "inappropriate for the app store". And maybe it is. But that wasn't the point of my post. I'm not looking for solutions, i'm sharing my experience. But thanks anyway
I’m just pointing out that people love to blame the platform owners for their own business failings - especially seeing similar apps have been successful on the same platform.
Would you also blame the console makers if you had a game that failed?
The point is that you have no idea whether fault lies with Apple in this case or not. Yet you seem to immediately assume and insinuate incompetence of the GP who was, as they already said, just sharing his experience.
These types of comments are not useful or (IMO) enjoyable to read.
If there are literally dozens of chat apps on iOS and his wasn’t allowed on there, who should I believe my own eyes or a random person on HN? What’s more likely that Apple single his one app out or there is more to the story?
I’m going by the evidence. I can point to plenty of links to successful chat apps. Can you point to a case from a reputable source where Apple didn’t allow a chat app? Which rule did Apple cite that disallowed his app but allowed the others?
Huh? The App Store only features apps that are... on the App Store. How can you look at that and know how many were rejected or killed by Apple? This is one anecdote of one chat app, that doesn’t mean it was the only one Apple rejected.
And almost every time that a class of apps get rejected for some seemingly benign reason, there are blog posts, write ups on major tech sites, etc.
Can you find one?
There are plenty of articles about Spotify rejections, Amazon and Apple going back and forth, apps that misuse the MDM functionality. But nothing about “chat apps”.
So because it was used to talk to celebrities instead of other people some reason Apple rejected it? Does that pass the sniff test to you? Do you think there might be more to the story?
Generally aside from games , them taking a 30% cut is generally the profit margin for most software companies. So unless of you can survive year 1 with funding of some kind, or are making side hustle apps, you have to wait till next year to get that 15% increase in subscription revenue. So you pay 30% + cost of user acquisition + all other costs and hope that you can profit. Definitely not developer friendly. Then there’s the issue of rejecting apps, pulling it when they want, building out the functionality themselves or buying a competitor and pushing their own version. Forgot to include Apples return policy for digital products is very hurtful for developers too, there’s been hundreds of articles on it, you literally can get anything digital for free if you contact Apple support and say you want a refund... LinkedIn subscriptions, game products, anything.
If Apple didn't spend billions per year over the last 15 years on research & development, marketing, retail, etc to put those devices in hands of your target market, with readily available payment methods and the trust to buy things online, how would most companies even begin to build a business? If you ship bits and bytes, then I think this is fairly owed.
Whenever I hear these gripes it makes me wonder why developers feel so entitled. Is it because we all came from a previous world where the PC was a more open platform for distribution? Apple is just a business. Do business with them or don't.
People were building and distributing software for decades without giving apple 30%. It's just a phone. Smartphones existed before the App Store, too. It provides useful services but it's not the virgin mary and it's not some profoundly new invention: They just did a bunch of things previous apps had done, did them well, and slotted them all together.
Things that existed before the app store:
* Store performing payment processing (steam, for example)
* Same storefront for purchase and install
* Automated updates
* User reviews
* Content submission and distribution (steam again, along with basically every other app store)
* Code signing
Things that appeared other places around when the app store got them, if not earlier:
* IAP
* Subscriptions
It's totally reasonable for Apple to put all this stuff together and decide it's a good enough package to charge you for it. It's also totally reasonable to think 30% is too much, and to think it's absurd that everyone is required to put up with their arbitrary rule enforcement.
If you're paying Apple for a service it's not "entitlement" to expect it to actually be good.
Exactly, the closest approximation to the App Store I can think of in the previous decades were game platforms like Nintendo and Sega. I would be curious to know from someone with experience how much % of revenue would have been allocated to licensing + all costs just to get someone to slam your cartridge into their system and press start.
EDIT: for an addressable market that was much smaller in scale.
> the closest approximation to the App Store I can think of in the previous decades were game platforms like Nintendo and Sega
I think a closer approximation was actual stores. If you wanted to sell in CompUSA, BestBuy, or CircuitCity, you had to go through a distributer. I think the big one most of them used was called Navaro or something like that? If you were a huge company like Microsoft, they would take a 30% cut of your sales. If you were anyone else, they would take a 50% cut. And you also had physical costs like boxes, printing, manuals, disks (floppy or CD), etc. That you can now do all of this from your own home and pay only 30% is a frickin' miracle!
The cost of licensing, manufacturing, cert etc in those days was quite high, yes. To be fair they were offering many services for that cost that you couldn't get elsewhere at the time. These days publishing on consoles is much cheaper and in some cases they've waived or eliminated many of the fees you used to have to pay for. In the XBox 360 days the certification process to push a build to consoles could itself cost you upwards of a thousand dollars depending on the circumstances, though it's my understanding that the fees would be waived in some cases (for bug fixes, etc). This was largely a necessity to prevent a broken build being shipped to 100k customers (because in those days it wasn't reasonable to expect everyone to download a 1gb patch), not as important now.
Steam is the best 1:1 approximation to the App Store and it predates it somewhat. The comparison isn't exact since they don't lock down your PC but they offer most of the same features.
I understand your comparison from how the underlying product is realized but I am looking at it from the value delivered to a software shop.
Whether it's Nintendo, Steam or iOS, the value delivered is the same: I give you docs, guides, etc to construct a program against an abstract target. When you are done and press the "ship it" button, an opportunity now exists, in the real world, for people to buy your thing and for you to keep some money.
Regardless of how the platform achieves this, the value is the same. You get to focus on building your product and collecting money. What I can't wrap my head around is why developer's are judging the affordability or fairness of this when the fractional cost may not have changed since the 80s/90s.
The iPhone may not be a PlayStation 4, but it's definitely comparable to the Nintendo Switch: powerful, handheld, the vast majority of apps are games, and you can hook it up to a TV!
The Apple TV 4K does 4K (unlike the original PS4), and the iPad Pro runs Fortnite at 120 FPS while the PS4 is stuck at 60 FPS.
Required to put up with arbitrary rule enforcement? You think I walk out of the store with a case of beer for the price I want to pay? That's just called business.
You list a bunch of inventions here but that isn't want creates value for end users. It costs money to put this technology into the hands of end users which are the costs I highlighted. Apple has a right to capture that value as they see fit.
"Apple has a right to capture that value as they see fit" is a big statement to make without a foundation behind it other than "it cost them money".
R&D for an automobile costs a lot, especially if you factor in the decades most manufacturers have spent refining their manufacturing and technology. Does that mean Ford should be able to legally require me to buy all parts and service at authorized dealers only? Because most countries' laws disagree with you for reasons I think should be obvious.
Hardware with bundled software has for whatever reason escaped the realities that apply to physical goods so far, even though it has obvious problems. Now we have tractors that refuse to be repaired without dealer authorization (yay DRM) and we have app store lock-in where anyone who wants to install apps on their phone has to have daddy's permission. If that's the ecosystem you want, so be it, and it's perfectly reasonable for Apple to charge for access, but that doesn't make it good. If you love the free market you should love the idea of a paid product needing to live up to its cost.
Separating the layers of hardware and software, for whatever reason has escaped the realities that a product doesn't draw arbitrary boundaries between these lines. Why is this particular interface so special?
Yes, if Ford believes that their customer's independent decisions about parts and service could lead them down a path that makes you more sour about Ford as a brand and degrade/ruin your relationship with Ford as a consumer. This could easily happen in the wild west of unauthorized parts and service. I think the laws are wrong in this case and compromises a company's ability to maintain that brand relationship. Are there undesirable consequences to this? Yes, but they can be sorted out one-by-one.
I'm saying if it weren't for Apple's closed loop, you wouldn't have a fragmentation free channel to billions of prospective customers. This is clearly getting even stronger with SwiftUI's ability to target across their product space (TV, Watch, Phone, Tablet, Computer). I am talking merely from a technical one, leaving aside the obvious financial disparity between Apple and the "other guys" (which I don't even think you can group into "Android" at this point it's such a mess)
There is this widespread assumption that Apple is looking out for the interests of developers on its platform.
However, like all large corporations, Apple is and always has looked out for its own interests only. If you keep this in mind, it's easy to understand why Apple does what they do.
If anyone believes a for profit company is looking out for anything but their own interests they are sorely mistaken almost all the time.
The thing with Apple though was there were good reasons to believe that their interests were strongly aligned with their users’ and by extension with indie developers.
At a time when the Mac was definitely not the obvious choice, Apple had a very strong interest in promoting high quality indie apps because that was a differentiator for their platform (they were also not as financially strong, so this pushed some of the costs of building differentiators out to Indies).
At a time when Apple made money solely off selling hardware directly to consumers, there was reason to believe their interests once again aligned with those consumers as opposed to MS who largely sold to OEMs and Google, who didn’t even sell their OS but made money off the user data.
But as Apple’s hardware growth is beginning to stall, it appears they’ve decided they must continue to grow financially, and the only way they can do so is by wringing more money out of their existing base. As a result it’s become more about doing stuff that was earlier being done by 3rd parties themselves. And that means indies are screwed becUse Apple can crush them in a way it couldn’t an Amazon or a Netflix, not that it’s not trying.
> The thing with Apple though was there were good reasons to believe that their interests were strongly aligned with their users’ and by extension with indie developers.
There were good reasons at one time, yes, for the reasons you give.
But there aren't good reasons now, because circumstances have changed.
Something similar happened in the 1990s with Microsoft and Windows. In the early days of Windows, MS encouraged third-party developers to code to it, because it helped to speed up the expansion of the user base. All kinds of good third-party Windows apps sprung up and thrived for a while.
But once the market was pretty much saturated with Windows, a lot of those third-party developers discovered that they were now basically doing market research for MS: whenever they hit on a killer app or feature, MS would simply duplicate it, ship it as part of Windows, and destroy the third party dev's market.
Incomplete. They may set their own interests first, but they reliably demonstrate the priority of users to the extreme annoyance of e.g. Netflix, Amazon, and so forth. For example, Apple is clearly looking out for the interests of users with higher precedence than the interests of developers. Developers chafe at this, but consider an example:
iOS 13 now throws a dialog asking you to confirm that you want an app to be using your location data in the background. Mobile user data resellers noted a massive worldwide drop in sellable location data when this feature was released. Is this benefit for Apple actual, Apple's users, and/or Apple's developers?
It's not for developers, because the developers either used the appropriate location permissions anyways, or are now discovering that their crappy ad frameworks are angering their userbase.
It's unclear whether it's for Apple actual, because there's no financial revenue gain when they institute this, only a drowning of the swamp of data reselling (without any corresponding monetary uptick anywhere). There's probably some indirect possibilities, but I can't construct a significant and plausible case. Perhaps someone else can.
It's absolutely clear that it's for Apple's users, because those are who is concerned about and harmed by data resale. It offers a free benefit at no cost to the user, requiring neither purchase nor subscription.
So it's essential to consider each of these aspects when assessing who's interests Apple is looking out for. Yes, it's easier to argue that Apple is selfish, because it's less work than considering the three-pronged reality of apple/users/developer. It's still worth the effort to do so.
I am not aware of this widespread assumption? Who the heck in the last 2 decades has gone through life thinking Apple is a company that prioritizes its developers over both its users and itself?
Source: literally every word written about Apple and developer relations and developer strategies over the last 20 years.
I'm not saying this to be critical of Apple, everyone has their own strategies and priorities. Rather, my mind is actually blown that you know anyone who thinks Apple is perceived as some sort of generous patron to developers, and even more that you know enough people like that to anecdotally think it's a widespread assumption.
We cant blame people who don't understand how it works for supporting this scheme. Programmers burning themselves on the corporate altar deserve blame for helping with the promotion of such a platform.
Until developers stop pushing this garbage on the rest of humanity Apple is completely right to make their things as Orwellian as they can.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I don't know what you mean by "these kinds of practices" but I agree with you to the extent that Apple is a for-profit company. Anything positive that Apple wants to achieve either for customers and/or society at large only happens if Apple is profitable. No profit, nothing else can or will happen. Profit is priority one as it should be for a business. Customers are next and Apple has succeeded only through driving profit by (most of the time) delighting customers. Developers are somewhere after that. This is how and why companies exist. I don't get why anyone expects anything different.
Amazon has leverage so their negotiation is different. Apple would be a poorly run business and less successful if they didn't negotiate and work deals in a manner consistent with reality. It is not good or bad, it is just the real world.
Two years after the developer program began, I wrote a coin-tossing app that did really well. I quit my job and wrote an AR like app that allowed you to simulate shooting through your camera FPS style.
It was very simple, displaying camera output, a cross hair - and when you pressed the button a blood splash appeared along with a gunshot sound. Tasteless, yes, but this was in the era of "More Cowbell" and other low-effort-leads-to-instant-retirement-apps.
Apple rejected the app. It upset me, but I figured - ok fair enough. I knew the risks. However I didn't feel the same when the next week one of the top 10 apps was EXACTLY THE SAME except they called it Paintball.
I had more than one conspiracy theory surrounding this ;-)
I released a small game to iOS once, but never again. It was a massive headache that wasn't worth the users. First of all, you can only build on a Mac, even if you are using a cross platform framework like Unity. So that's like $300 for a used mac mini. Second of all you have to pony up $100 per year. Third of all, Apple will reject your app at their whim and leisure. Like all the games currently being rejected having to do with toilet paper.
I’m glad Apple rejects lots apps and I’m glad it costs money to get into the App Store. Every time I look the Google Play store I decide it’s not worth engaging with, as a user. Too much garbage and malware.
Pretty much. I don’t really “surf the Internet” like I did when I was younger. The web was ruined by ads long ago, and there’s very little content worth engaging in, especially without the curation that sites like HN provide.
The difference is you're choosing your curators (e.g. Hacker News) independent of other choices you've made i.e. your hardware provider.
Would you just go along with it happily if Apple (or any other company for that matter) blocked access to Hacker News because it didn't meet their standards? Or vice versa, if Hacker News refused to serve you simply because you're using an Apple device?
Apples standards are my standards. If that stops being the case, I’ll stop being a customer.
Sure. I’m smart enough to dig through the bargain bin of Google Play apps to find the ones that work with my device, don’t have ads, and have the appropriate level of functionality and polish. I just don’t want to. I’d rather pay a premium for a company to do it for me.
Indeed. If you want to use their hardware, then you've no choice in the matter.
To be clear, I have absolutely zero issue with you choosing to be their customer. They make fantastic hardware, there are an enormous amount of pros to being an Apple customer. It's perfectly reasonable to look at these pros and cons and choose to be an Apple customer.
However, taking one of those cons and trying to sell it as a pro requires a fair bit of doublethink.
You could be using an Apple device and choosing Apple as your app curator. Lack of choice is not a feature.
>You could be using an Apple device and choosing Apple as your app curator. Lack of choice is not a feature.
Some people want to make as few choices as possible. That’s me. I don’t want to look at two or more app stores to find what I want. The lack of choice, for me, is a feature.
I understand that I’m a special type of narrow minded on this point. And I’m glad Android exists — I have a few Android devices myself, for hobbies and such - they’re just not what I would use for my daily driver.
I think the point is that Apple could still run their own App Store, which meets all of your requirements, without excluding all alternatives, which others might find valuable even if you choose not to use them yourself.
I do not agree that Apple can maintain the same high quality App Store while not excluding alternatives. Alternative App Store will invite developers to put in less effort to reach the same audience. I do not want this.
Surely that would just mean that application developers unwilling to comply with Apple's standards and pay its price of admission would be excluded from its App Store? Isn't that what you want, by your own arguments?
> I don’t really “surf the Internet” like I did when I was younger.
omg i miss that term so much!
a few days ago, i looked up hamburger buns recipe in google search and got very frustrated by the websites i got back.
one page immediately triggered my laptop fan and pushed my CPU to the max. it was playing a video completely unrelated to the recipe i came for. one page showed so much ads that there was a tiny little space left for the recipe. one another page, scrolling was broken by an ad and i had to turn off javascript and images to make that page function at all.
all that time, i was thinking about the non tech-savvy person who was just looking for a recipe. these shenanigans are extreme against that group of people because we hackers would immediately raise strong voices.
It's arguable that the Internet has gotten worse not because there's too many inconsistent, uncurated websites (analogous to the apps on the Google Play store, but because there's too many sites that have been siloed into standard formats maximizing SEO and ad revenue conforming to the expectations laid out by the major ad networks. There's fewer spontaneous websites with content people put up just for the sake of sharing or expressing. Instead sites are created with the goal of profit maximization. In other words, it's gotten worse because it's become more like the App Store.
correct response for people like the above. the internet has weird shit, no gatekeeper. yet folks never stop using it. n apple is busy stifling web apps by only allowing one browser engine. I will only buy another iOS device again when I can run gecko | firefox on it
Users are people, not cattle. Yes there's value in sensible defaults but once you've paid (dearly) for hardware, you should be able to use it as you see fit.
A cow using an internet connected device is better at avoiding scams and malware than my parents. At least the cow won't have the dexterity to click on garbage. My parents will never have sufficient knowledge of modern English nor the concepts around what is and isn't malware.
For them, I need a device that lets them Facetime and WhatsApp and browse the internet and takes photos and videos of their grandkids. They are never going to create anything, and iOS is perfect for them.
It has nothing to do with the big boss deciding what is allowed and what is not. Take a look at F-Droid. A lot of very well done, useful and gratis apps. It is just proprietary software vs free software.
I translated the description. The name of the game translates to "Jump <slur for prostitute>" and requires you to curse during the game (it's using the microphone).
In other words the censors didn't realize that the entire game is built on obscenities.
For those of us who use a Mac that's not a headache. Second, every time I open the Play Store on one of my Android phones I feel like I'm about to catch an STD. Not to mention there's about 1500 Chinese clones for every single app, making it impossible to find anything useful through search. Apple is definitely doing the right thing, although I do agree that randomly rejecting apps (although that has never happened to me - I always had a positive experience with app reviewers) can be demoralizing.
Have you recently used the app store? It's horrible. Most of the apps are just ad filled junk. Some of them outright try to scam you with bait and switch tactics like taking advantage of Touch ID to get you to start a trial and then charging for 70$/week after your 1 week trial ends.
And I've recently came across a lot of "free" apps with good reviews that are only free to download but requires you to pay the moment you start using them... and pay for a subscription. They seem to wait for the app to get good ratings and then push an update that essentially turns it into a paid app in disguise.
The layout and the UI of the app store itself are just horrendous too imo.
Having android and apple devices I always prefer using the google play store, because at least the UI is usable.
Occasionally I blow the mind of yet another non-technical person who learns from me that not only does Apple require iStore apps to be developed using their hardware, but also there's an annual fee for the privilege of being able to publish to the app store.
And on top of that a 30% fee from in app purchases during the first year.
I think large-company actions should be measured by “would this behavior practically bankrupt a small company?”, and Apple has quite a few things in this category.
They do things that are only tolerated, frankly, because developers have no choice. 90% of App Review seems damned arbitrary, and since I can regularly find examples of clear scams their “review” isn’t even effective.
There was this idea of breaking "Big Tech" apart floating around a few months ago. It was probably over-zealous as it was proposed, but I now honestly believe that it's a good idea to REQUIRE (by regulations) the major (again defined in such regulations) appstores be operated by a separate entity dedicated to such a role, and subject to extra scrutiny to prevent this kind of anti-competition behavior. Putting it simply, you can't run an appstore and publish apps in it too.
If Apple wasn’t on the chopping block for antitrust before, they certainly are now. As a developer, I knew that Apple would relax their policies for large companies, but this…wow.
Amazon (likely after many years of negotiations) got itself a better deal than individual developers? This looks to me like complaining that corporations can aquire goods and services in bulk cheaper than would be for a single person to get in a generic supermarket. I'm all for equality, but this looks like a good precedent that might open more options eventually. What is the backlash here against?
It’s not a tax, it’s like a rent. They built and run the ecosystem, you don’t have to be part of it if you don’t like it, it’s completely voluntary, unlike a tax.
It’s rent in the sense of rent seeking. You control an asset and let others pay for using it, if they want to. Rent seeking is not a very good thing but it’s a minuscule part of Apple’s business model. I also can’t see how a small developer can find it unfair, 30% for access to the best mobile ecosystem seems a pretty good deal to me, and I’m a mobile developer. I can agree that it seems expensive to Amazon or Spotify though.
I don't see it as tax or rent, but a business partnership with a revenue sharing model. Amazon has a unique deal, Google has a unique deal to bring search in Safari, Microsoft has a unique deal. Apple can't sign unique deals with all developers so this is a fair and scalable way to create business deals using APIs. It isn't perfect, but it works. If it didn't, it wouldn't be so successful.
Now this makes me wonder, if Microsoft products on the App Store also gets special treatment with lower cuts than others.
Aside from this issues, I wish Apple maintain the 30% cut on Games, ( Since Games even has its whole own section in App Store anyway ) and lowered the cuts to 20% for everything else. I think that would be a fairer approach to every body.
30% Cuts for all other Apps is just insanely expensive.
Apple charges 30% from newspapers and magazines - an industry that is struggling to make any money.
But not Facebook which makes way more money than all the newspapers in the world taken together.
Yes Apple built the platform but by charging a 30% margin it is fleecing it’s customers who already paid through their noses for the devices and/or skimming the entire profit of some developers.
It doesn’t even seem like a good business practice from a corporation that makes most of its money through other seemingly legit means.
Bottom line, all the virtue signaling aside, Apple is very much a capitalist concern with the morality of a cute crocodile. What’s a monopoly without a little price gouging, eh??
Imagine if you owned the electricity lines that ran around the city, and anyone who integrated an electrical appliance with 'your electricity' had to give you a 30% cut of their business?
Make a toaster? Apple gets 30% of that.
This is not new stuff. What Apple is doing is essentially anticompetitive.
Similarly, Google uses it's dominance in search to take over other categories.
I don't see a single politician who seems to understand the issue well enough, and 90% of them seem to have no clue. But I think that possibly Elizabeth Warren would actually be useful if she didn't overreach. (FYI this is absolutely not a political point, I'm not supporting left/right/Dem/Rep or any view and not even supporting someone's candidacy - I'm saying she's one of the few candidates that seems to be interested in this, and maybe has a grasp of it).
We have to be really careful with regulation, but I think there are a handful of anticompetitive, labour, and privacy regulations that would make America an even better and more competitive landscape.
By the way - the unspoken elephant is China dumping on tech landscape as well. There is a reason that trade agreements have an issue with government subsidies of businesses. Dumping is more obvious with commodities, but it's the same thing with other companies, i.e. Huawei, and it will creep into others (Zoom?). It needs to be at least looked at.
I've not read anything yet that actually matches the headline of Amazon "not paying the tax". All I've seen is that users can now purchase content without going through Apple's in-app payment pipeline and instead use Amazons. The agreement with Amazon could still demand that Amazon pay to Apple 30% of the value of anything sold through the in-app channel.
Apple is a monopolist for the iOS App Store. The eco-system is controlled by them using their rules and they compete with others in the same app space. The whole thing is rigged to the extent that an anti-competitive investigation should be done into the market place by the Justice dept.
Having had an app on App Store for 5 years, finally moving off. React, Flutter, and PWA make it unnecessary. Personally, I rarely use apps as typing a couple characters in URL bar is easier than scrolling through apps.
Lastly, users are much more prone to drop 1 star reviews for little reason other than getting dev attention. Most of my stars are 5 star or 1 star, seems off.
I would be pretty surprised if Apple let Spotify do this, even if the latter were willing. They're direct competitors to Apple's hopeful cash cow Music service.
For those who are against regulating Amazon because "in a free market someone could overthrow Amazon as the leader at any time so the fact they are on top means they must be providing the best service for consumers", this is a great example of why that's not true.
The Apple Tax is the cost of distribution, Amazon has widespread distribution so they are off the hook, not saying it’s fair but that is my reasoning behind it
Can the submitted title please be changed to match the original title? It should be "Why Amazon got out of the Apple App Store tax, and why other developers won’t"
Everyone has complete control over what they do with their own lives. People should focus more on that, and spend less time writing long winded articles about what other people do. Worrying about what other people do is the path to insanity. Just my 2 cents.
You are not being forced to use those platforms. There are other ways to be a developer. They may not be convenient for you but that's a different problem. I know pivoting your skillset can be hard but it's an option that is always available to you.
It’s more than just inconvenience. If Apple can be protectionist about its Apple store than the developers can be protectionist of their skills and careers as developers on the Apple platform.
I agree that it's not fair or consistent but saying that alone means nothing. For any impact, action must be taken on those words: you can use legal means to try and change their behavior like Spotify did, you can negotiate like Amazon did, you can apply pressure by trashing them in the press like Epic did, you can attempt to circumvent the app store fees using various measures, you can leave for a different platform. Or you can apply some combination of any of these. Which one is the least expensive is entirely dependent on your situation. The reason why I spoke of the last option initially is that for the average individual developer your only real immediate action is to leave, everything else is collective in nature.
As far as I know it’s an important realization in Buddhist practice, maybe it deserves a second thought. Or at least a valid refutation, instead of an opinion such as this one.
Except that it isn't. While it's also technically true that we could all decide to live in the forest tomorrow and refuse to be part of the world, what do you think is the likelihood of that?
Real problems require real solutions, not back of the hand pontificating about how all choices are 100% free and just choose not to you lazy bastard.
A real argument would recognize the complexity rather than act like it doesn't exist.
We’re not talking about living in the woods. We’re talking about a small segment of developers who feel entitled to benefit from Apple’s products and also set their terms while they are at it. I think people that think this way also ignore complexities at play, which you bring up and I agree exist.
The post that kicked off this chain made the point that you can choose not to develop on Apple platforms. I think it’s a mistake to conflate “first-world” decisions like which platforms or languages to use, or market segmentation or where we can make the most money the quickest with hockey stick growth to please our VC investors, with “third-world” lifestyles or asceticism.
As though if one doesn’t develop on Apple tech, they may as well wander off into the woods? We should check our privilege here.
This kind of statement always comes with the underlying assumption that Apple is where it is without any kind of artificial crutch, and likewise the developers should suck it up and show their own rugged individualism in dealing with the problem.
In reality a company like Apple depend on tomes of rules and government enforcement to defend its fortune. Rules that are themselves an artificial construct that it and its peers have championed and lobbied for. Rules that give legal backing and physical force to its contracts, relationships with suppliers, IP, that together allow an artificially restricted system like the App Store to even exist.
To suggest that individuals then cannot petition to have some additional restrictions put in to provide some balance is disingenuous and will only maintain and encourage systems like this in the future.
That's one approach, however it's hard to just exclude oneself out of the one of the two large mobile phone application stores, through which apps must be installed and sold (at least if you're going to make a living as an app developer.) Monopolies and duopolies have disproportionate power.
Even if mostly ineffective, there's some value in protesting a corporations inconsiderate actions. At the very least, it reveals a potential market opportunity for an eventual competitor (as hard as it'd be for anyone else to unseat Apple and Google at this point.)
Except that on hardware that's so worshipped and recommended to everyone here in HN you cannot do that at all: on iOS devices, presumably the future of computing, you cannot build a product doesn't pay tax to Apple and isn't approved by their censors.
the problem is that Apple, Google, Facebook, Uber understand pretty well how to play the game dirty. Normal consumers get a nice experience when they use their services. They are 99% of the people and are happy enough. The (smaller) content creators and developers who are in the absolute minority are treated like shit. Big tech doesn't give a single F#$k about any of those. And normal consumers on average do not care about implicit negative consequences for others when using/buying services. Whether its a child labor, pollution or mistreated developers/publishers.
The only way of changing this is by some firge political actions.
Apple's been like this forever, it's only gotten much worse since the late 2000's and the launch of the iTunes App store. Even in the old days, when Mac Classic existed, Apple would change its mind about stuff for developers all the time. Anyone remember OpenDoc and how that was gonna change the world? Apple's favorite thing to do is tell developers it's got the next big thing (Newton), next big language (remember Swift?), or the next big tool (AR). They hand this out to devs, devs eat it up, and like 1 or 2 years later, they either spring said thing like a trap no one can escape from, or they just give up on it and act like it never happened and move on, leaving developers with useless new skills.
If we're going to mine ancient history, lets put up a disclaimer that any company that exists for a 40+ years and is trying to invent new things is going to change their mind about stuff. If they didn't, they probably wouldn't be very good at inventing things.
There's context to consider with Apple in the 90s, which was weeks from bankruptcy. Here's SJ's rather famous response at WWDC 97 to why OpenDoc was killed, and a little later on he describes his opinion of Newton [1]. Hard to disagree with the sentiments.
Killing OpenDoc and Newton was a way to keep the company alive and prepare for the next big thing. 4 years later, out pops the iPod. 10 years later, the iPhone.
I’ve replied to your baseless statements about swift already below, and as to AR: nobody knows what will come of it but apple most definitely haven’t abandoned it. They keep increasing their investments into ARKit and even added a Lidar to the ipad last week.
It's still here, but people were so excited about it when it came out, and some folks actually thought it'd be usable on other platforms. Here were are years later and it's just a niche language for iPhones. Everyone who was excited about it seems to have stopped being excited because it's 100% Apple only. Like all their stuff. I mean, is there anything better than a completely closed source programming language?
Are you serious? There is an entire industry around swift, countless blogs, podcasts, books and websites. Interest is growing steadily and people are more excited than ever. It’s open source and has a very engaged community around it’s development, anyone can propose changes to it.
And of course it’s not 100% apple only, apple themselves have invested a lot in swift on linux, and others are working on swift for windows and webassembly. You couldn’t be more wrong actually.
Swift is not closed source, it’s open source on GitHub. In addition, Swift currently runs on both macOS and Linux. There is a pull request open that introduces Windows support which I believe will be released with the next point version of Swift.
One of the many silly rejections we had was due to the images on our influencers profiles being too sexy despite being linked through the Instagram API. After explaining they were the same as you can find in the Instagram app we were told we had to actively censor them anyway. Shame on us for not being as big as Instagram, right?
After a year of making less margin from our own business than Apple they concluded paid chat was no longer appropriate for the app store and decided to just put us out of business one morning. Meanwhile, tons of other apps with the same functionality and far more sexualized are alive and doing well.
It can't be easy making every developer happy while curating the tidal wave of apps coming in each day, but it was a really soul crushing experience for us.