It's a good thing for Apple that WWDC isn't in-person this year. I wouldn't trust the developers in the audience to stay quiet and applause at the announcements this year...
I'm surprised that Hey! managed to create such a big public outrage about that issue. Years ago Spotify complained about the very same thing and given that Spotify has a much bigger userbase I kind of expected the outrage to be bigger.
I suppose a large share of the potential Hey customers work in tech and might have a better understanding of what the app store tax actually means. And the EU anti trust investigations probably play role too?
I doubt that was a real factor, but maybe the webpage itself is. It is really well done: clear, compelling, and responsive, even. The Spotify website was more artistic, less visually readable, and didn't have as punchy points or counterexamples, at least to my memory.
Hey was extremely hyped before the launch. At least in certain tech / developer circle. And people have been wanting something new to email. With a waiting list of over 70K, and 10K from first day alone. People saying Hey is hyped up because of Apple is getting the story backwards. The waiting list is also not just filling in an email address but actually writing an email saying you want in. That is some friction involved and I have seen lots of people while interested but didn't bother with writing one.
Remember Hey isn't free. People on waiting list already knew this from day one. With 70K invite, that is $7M annual revenue already.
DHH also went on about making sure no mention of Sign up in Webpages as well as many other commonly known App Stores rules before the App was submitted. And many thought it would pass, and it did for 1.0.
It is the bug fix 1.01 update that was blocked Due to IAP reason. For most if not all iOS developers. This is new. So new that Fastmail didn't get their treatment until now. [1]
This new IAP rule force 30% on new sign up, as you could not even allow the App to be on App Store without IAP ( hence this website ). Along with the threat from Apple about pulling Hey from App Store, and finally their tone, which was like adding even more fuel to outrage, and I quote
Thank you for being an iOS app developer. We understand that Basecamp has developed a number of apps and many subsequent versions for the App Store for many years, and that the App Store has distributed millions of these apps to iOS users. These apps do not offer in-app purchase — and, consequently, have not contributed any revenue to the App Store over the last eight years.
Is not exactly helping and got even more outrage from developers who dont even use Hey. To me that is about the most polite way from Apple saying fuck you. ( If the webpage author is reading this I suggest you include this quote on the webpage, or make a new site with all the popular useful free Apps that helped users but contributed noting to Apple. )
I know there are many who hate DHH and Ruby Rails, but seriously I cant see how he could have orchestra the whole thing as marketing. As if he knew about the IAP rule changes before hand.
Hey was really hyped, it was actually crazy. I'm happy to pay for my mail service, but 99€ for an individual plan seems pretty hefty to me.
There are regularly stories about iOS apps getting removed for odd reasons on the HN tops, but the Hey story blew up pretty quickly.
> I know there are many who hate DHH and Ruby Rails
I also I also heard that a lot of people hate DHH and his Twitter comment bubble doesn't seem to like HN. Either way, he is certainly not wrong about the issue. I also don't see how Hey would profit from marketing around that. First of all, Hey is pretty expensive and has a pretty narrow target audience as of now. Most people are perfectly happy with their free mail, people who aren't are probably already aware that those alternatives exist. Even more importantly, I don't see how they are going to profit by putting their App Store listing at risk. I doubt an E-Mail service is able so succeed if it doesn't offer native applications or at least a integration with third party clients. Since they chose to not support IMAP etc, Hey's iOS app is integral to the buisness. No app in the store, no profit.
Everyone is home on their mobile devices waiting for things to happen. I don’t think this outrage is as widespread as it seems, we just live in a tech echo chamber that is resonating pretty loudly right now. And, it’s the weekend before WWDC, so Apple headlines grab extra attention. I think if this happened six months ago, no one would be talking about Hey and they’d have acquiesced by now.
I expected that the tech-echo chamber plays a role, but I was askeby friends what this discussion is all about. Said friends don't work in the industry and aren't really tech-savy either. Sure, is obviously tech focused, but it seems more widespread than back when Spotify sued.
Could someone point out where the "you download the app and it doesn't work" [1] and the "the criteria is different for apps that are targeted at businesses instead of consumers" [2] rules are actually listed for developers to read?
The rule that business-targeted apps and consumer-targeted apps are subject to different IAP rules is not in the App Store Review Guidelines. Basecamp asked them why Hey was blocked and Basecamp was not, they were given that as a response.
However, even if apps/companies have sign up in the app I still use the web browser to sign up. I like the security of the browser more for personal info and set up than an app full of unnecessary permissions.
I personally truly do not mind, and even prefer, opening up a browser to sign up. Overall for liability reasons it might even be better to just have one endpoint for signing up, the web.
They can dictate it, they just should be consistent.
Force everyone to do it or no-one, don't pick the WORST POSSIBLE APP to deny. @dhh isn't one of the people Apple really wants to get on the bad side of (See Apple Card debacle).
TVs used to come with circuit diagrams so that people could repair it themselves at home using standard parts. I've not seen anything like that in many years, even for far simpler appliances.
I feel like that's a disingenuous comparison, given how complex the electronics of appliances must be nowadays (disclaimer: I have absolutely no idea, my experience is strictly at the software level) - but the general principle should still apply to be able to use products that you own in a (non-harmful) way that you choose.
Still there are components were a schematic would be useful. For example a schematic of the power supply, since 90% of the faults that TVs have are related to that. A power supply is not that complex and having a schematic would mean that repairs would be simpler.
Also nowadays it would be useful to have some sort of debug port, for example a serial port to connect and have a CLI to do diagnostic, upload a new firmware, etc. They have these interfaces in the TVs but most of the time are either disabled or protected so the end user cannot use them.
That would mean you could fix it yourself and cut out their authorized repair program. Better to just not put release the schematics, but also not go after anyone that creates the schematics either.
See dishwashers, microwaves, Apple iPhones, and washing machines. Car manufacturers still publish schematics for their circuitry (for a fee)
> TVs used to come with circuit diagrams so that people could repair it themselves at home using standard parts.
Nowadays a brand new high end +2000€ Samsung TV comes with ads (!) in the menu and the apps feel like they'd be running on a potato. With that kind of Smart TVs, the hardware won't be the issue since it'll be the software that will be obsole way before the hardware. Smart TV is not a promise, its a thread.
Apple crafts their sales pitch around being a secure device that has a lot of restrictions (which means you can't install what you want, but it also protects non-tech savvy people from messing up their device or being hacked)
It is a pretty well established model. I don't like it sometimes either, but you know what you are getting when you buy an iPhone. It isn't like they changed policy after you bought the device.
And neither does Apple. You are free to offer both in app and out of app subscriptions and charge different prices. You don’t have to sell your app in the App Store, you have to distribute it.
This makes me wonder if they could charge $99/year on their website but $999/year via in-app purchase. Basically a price so high that no one would realistically buy it from within the app.
It technically fulfills the requirements specified in the review guidelines but I suspect it would be frowned upon.
When you bought the device, did you expect it to run “Hey”? If Apple promised that, sue them. If not, you’re just confused about what you bought and probably shouldn’t handle your own money.
It’s their store, and they get to pick what’s in it. If you want stuff not available in that store, you need a new store. You own the phone, but you agreed to only load software on it from the one store, as it has been for the last decade.
No, they need to allow other stores with different rules and different pricing models. If not, then their store needs to drop the anti competitive practices. This is what the EU investigation is about.
Until the EU decides, they don’t need to do anything. And when the EU decides, if they decide it’s not anti-competitive, they get to go back to doing nothing. You have a choice of what device you use, and if you don’t like all of the things that come with Apple products, vote with your money and use something else.
Well pointed out, although critics will say, "it is not a bug, it's a feature", e.g. "walled garden life".
Imagine if you bought a Microsoft Surface and you could only use the Windows Store to download apps on your device.. People would be outraged, but since it's Apple it is "expected"...
Hint, if it is expected, that doesn't mean it's still ok..
I'm pretty surprised they haven't just Maliciously Complied by offering an in-app signup buried somewhere obscure in the app, with lots of big flashing warning signs saying "don't click this, it's only for compliance reasons" - and a nice discoverable easily-followable link to the browser-based sign-up.
They could be continuing to make the (justified and correct!) stink about Apple's terrible practices, while also having their app on the store (or forcing Apple to further highlight how arbitrarily-applied their standards are). Win-win.
Honestly - I don't think it would be accepted. But, in either outcome, they're better off:
* If it gets accepted - great, they're unblocked, and can keep delivering for customers
* If it doesn't get accepted, they have even more ammunition to say "look, even when we conform to Apple's rules, they _still_ block us".
part of the app store rules is you can't do that. you have to offer it for the same price. somehow spotify seem to have gotten away with not doing this.
Could they just put in a random explanatory video and say the functionality for non-users is they're able to watch the video? It seems like they just need to have any kind of non-user thing to do...
That said, I think Apple forbids you trying to redirect people out of the app by explaining that they take a cut if you sign up in it.
An alternative I’ve seen is let users register for a free account don’t indicate there’s an upgrade but drip email a few days down the road for the user to upgrade via a web workflow
Right, and - as I said in another comment - being rejected when they are actually conforming to the rules (however asinine those rules may be) will be further ammunition to point out how inconsisently-applied those rules are.
Apple doesn't allow a link in the app to direct users to a website to collect payment. You can't even merely say that there's a website where you can pay outside the app. Notice how many apps in the article simply don't provide any explanation about how users are supposed to sign up?
This violates the App Store Review Guidelines 3.1.3(b) [1]:
> You must not directly or indirectly target iOS users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase, and your general communications about other purchasing methods must not discourage use of in-app purchase.
> $99/year email service, of which Apple is rent-seeking $30
I'm wholly on Hey's side here, but I think this is a misleading way of putting it. Apple only wants 30% of in-app purchases, not purchases made outside of the app. The contention is that Hey thinks they shouldn't be required to accept in-app purchases, which given that either Hey or the user pays Apple an expensive tax on those purchases, makes sense to me.
No, they allow you to have out-of-app sign ups as long as you also have in-app sign-ups, and you can't reference the out-of-app signups (e.g. link to them) from within the app.
Well, there __is__ In-App Purchase support, but it only works if your IP is in the 17.0.0.0/8 block. We put it in because we knew it was very important to Apple ;)
Good start with compiling the list .. a couple more .. AirBnb, All airline apps. Maybe they have contracts with the big guys for some lump sum deal, or maybe they are just letting them go as they have to ... We developers already pay for the subscription, WWDC, a shiny iPhone / MBP every couple of years (to test and develop the new features :(, learn a language and sdks just for the Apple world - We Devs need Apple for sure, but hey they need us too (!) .. high time for a push back .. Apple makes tons on the devices, they need to stop robbing from us little guy developers. Apple do the right thing and drop this 30% altogether .. you will not miss it :)
I agree with everyone else here that Apple’s weird rules and the inconsistent way they’re enforced are both bad. But I don’t think the solution is as obvious as “drop the 30% cut”.
How should Apple go about making money from the App Store? Paid apps are dwindling off. They do charge a flat fee per developer, but it can’t be too large or they’ll lose all the indie developers, and there just aren’t enough developers overall to make that a viable business on its own. They could charge a flat fee to the developer per app download -- something really small, a few cents per download -- but then what about free apps?
What they want is to take a share of the profits from developers who are making money on their platform, while also supporting free apps free of charge. The 30% fee is their attempt to do that. The problem is that it’s easy to game the system and just run your payments outside their store. Hence all the silly rules to try to prevent that.
Maybe 30% is just too much. Would people complain as much if it were 10%, or 5%?
Or maybe they should just give up on App Store revenue and focus on hardware sales. But it would be a little weird for them not to have a direct incentive to improve the store experience for users.
Those are good ideas, yeah, but nothing is perfect.
The promotions one is interesting; I think it has the same pitfall as AdWords: if my app / web page is the best result for the user for a given search, why should I have to pay money to promote it? If Apple or Google is doing their job right, taking money for promotions is actively detrimental to users. Not that that stops AdWords, of course.
Charging the users would make sense. It’s a shame that we’ve all been trained to expect this stuff to be free.
I guess subscription-based stores are a decent approach? Like Apple Arcade. But that has downsides for users too -- you potentially end up paying multiple subscriptions (like most people do now for streaming TV) so it adds barriers to entry for new (possibly better) stores. Who wants to pay for yet another subscription service?
Basically every app that is used to sell goods or as an add on to a physical product doesn't have to pay Apple a cut. And it makes sense: the app is free and only the means to access a backend service or a something that was paid separately. I just don't get why it wouldn't apply to HEY: no idea of how it works, but I can imagine that for $99/year you get more than a shiny UI. That is only the means to access a backend service that is entirely independent from Apple's ecosystem (and in fact can be accessed through several channels).
Getting 30% from the whales and scammers is worth too much and a bit of bad PR or the loss of good apps isn't going to change that. They need the big players like Netflix, but after that scummy, high margin, do nothing, trash apps are the best for profits.
Yeah. A huge percentage of the stuff marketed to children and teens is pretty unethical IMO. The thing is, those are cheap to produce and have huge margins, so that's what everyone tries to make.
It's less risky to develop some skinner box slot machine because you aren't out much investment if it gets rejected. Plus, the digital goods are pulled from thin air, so anything you sell is pure profit.
Contrast that with a real app that provides a valuable service with backend costs and a subscription fee. There's a lot more investment to build an app like that, so getting rejected is a huge risk and, even at 15%, Apple's cut might be a big chunk of your margin.
Since Apple incentivizes low effort slot machines and detriments high quality apps, I feel like there's been an increasing portion of the app store is turning into what I consider garbage apps.
The subscription cut also creates the opposite scenario of what everyone is always parroting about iOS customers being profitable. They might spend more money, but they're definitely not more profitable (per customer) if you're paying 15% to a middleman.
Yea this is probably the best year to introduce unpopular, rent-seeking rules. You'll never be forced to see any of these people in person and the government has enough on its plate to even consider thinking about anti-trust issues.
I'm confused why they don't rip the bandaid off and just charge everyone at the same time though. Charging Tesla 30% probably isn't feasible but this seems like an ideal time to introduce fees for all companies that are currently allowed exemptions (Netflix, Lyft, Airbnb, Uber, Audible, Airlines etc). Yes they could put up a fight but at least some of them would cave.
Until the government gets involved, they are totally allowed to selectively and arbitrarily enforce the rules. Banning Hey but not Netflix just makes them look like hypocrites and makes them less money. Seems like the worst of both worlds.
You think Netflix would cave to apple on this? I don't think so. Netflix would just make it extremely public that Apple have blocked user access to the app on iOS. Apple is the one that will cave, not Netflix. I mean, come on, iPhones are popular but not even majority of the market.
> Charging Tesla 30% probably isn't feasible but this seems like an ideal time to introduce fees for all companies that are currently allowed exemptions (Netflix, Lyft, Airbnb, Uber, Audible, Airlines etc).
Since cars are physical goods, Tesla COULD freely sell the car in the app using Apple Pay, Credit Card, etc in the app if they wanted, just like Amazon, Walmart and other e-commerce apps do. They wouldn't pay the 30%, just the credit card fee.
Similarly, Lyft, Airbnb, Uber and some Airlines accept ApplePay, Credit Card, etc, all without the 30%, because it's a physical service, not software or a digital product.
Netflix and Audible just don't sell their stuff on the app. It's not an exemption, it's something predicted in the App Store terms: don't link to the signup/sales page. The problem here is that Hey is claiming that they should be allowed to use that rule that Netflix and Audible use.
Apple has never had a problem with physical goods not paying the 30%. So WeWork, Tesla, AirBnb, airline tickets, etc would all be fine. The 30% cut was on digital goods as I recall. My last company sold things like gym memberships and bicycle rentals and Apple never had an issue with it. Although they did question us the first time we hit the App Store and the Mac App Store. Once we explained we weren’t selling digital goods we got approved.
I tried to limit the list to apps where you couldn't get to _any_ functionality without logging in. AirBnB lets you browse around etc. Airlines let you look at dates / availability.
I included Wells Fargo, however, because I thought it was wild that they're able to provide straight web links to Safari to sign up for banking services, whereas Hey has to pretend like accounts are bestowed via divine intervention.
Why, then, did Apple decide to gerrymander its rules to extract rent from one industry and not the other?
Perhaps there's an ethical or philosophical argument why Apple feels entitled to one industry's revenue and not the other, but I haven't heard that argument.
Consider the user experience of an email app that only works when you have a network connection — so you can’t even see your mail when you’re offline. Pretty lousy.
Ordinarily I would be inclined to say that as a "private marketplace", Apple is entirely within its rights to selectively enforce rules (and whims) like this so as to maximize their profit, but surely there must be a limit when about 45% of US smartphone users (so about 36% of the population) have an iPhone [1]?
At this point this is no private dark pool, but a public market place, the transactions on which affect an unfathomable number of consumers, and Apple should and must be subject to the level of government regulation and oversight that governs other public market places like the NYSE and the CME. I suspect that this will come sooner or later, or otherwise these markets will be broken up entirely, but behavior like this from Apple only hastens this outcome.
I dislike the 30% IAP cut as much as the next developer, but what is it about perceived tech monopolies that bring out the hyperbolic comparisons?
> Apple should and must be subject to the level of government regulation and oversight that governs other public market places like the NYSE and the CME.
First it's Facebook should be treated as a Public-as-in-Government Square, and now the App Store should be governed like the stock market?
I think Apple's morally in the wrong here. But the solution isn't just going to be just pulling some lofty regulation out of thin air and trying to re-apply it.
> But the solution isn't just going to be just pulling some lofty regulation out of thin air and trying to re-apply it.
That's exactly what the solution will be. Apple will eventually be responsible for ushering in regulation that kills software distribution monopolies like the App Store. It'll be an interesting new landscape to be in for a lot of markets.
I don’t think anything will change unless a strong class action and/or monopoly suit is brought against Apple and I often wonder why we haven’t seen one yet.
The EU's new antitrust investigation [1] might be close enough to a monopoly suit, just likely to be slower and more drawn out. It had the desired effect against Internet Explorer though last time around, I guess.
Relevant quote from investigation announcement: "The investigations concern in particular the mandatory use of Apple's own proprietary in-app purchase system and restrictions on the ability of developers to inform iPhone and iPad users of alternative cheaper purchasing possibilities outside of apps."
Apple also doesn't allow any browser technology other than their built-in WebKit so all browsers are internally the same on iOS.
They also doesn't support free VP9 video coded because they are part of competitive FFMPEG.
I didn't like Apple due to this gatekeeper/walled garden but I started to hate it more after watching "Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine" documentary. Such a big company and still they did illegal option backdating, avoiding tax in Ireland, etc.
It needs more time for people to realize their mistake of supporting this company.
I really don’t get the hills people choose to die on these days.
Do you want a successful business? Ok, then follow the rules, cover your ass, and do what you need to do to get your business going, even if it’s not always the ideal situation for you.
But no, I guess lashing out explosively and torpedoing everything because you’re not treated like the big players when you’re still a little guy is more satisfying, if less profitable.
It's precisely because everyone's so deeply cynical and feeling so powerless, that these rent seeking practices continue to flourish.
The way out is not to try and carve out a little niche for yourself and hope they don't come for you next. You can if you're a selfish coward but know that people don't respect selfish cowards and unless you want to live alone or with a few other cowards who agree to cling to each other for miserly comfort, it is a losing strategy.
The way out is also not to cause anarchy because 'everything is fucked anyway'.
This PR tsunami is actually one of the best weapons against monopolies, because they signal to policy makers that they can make a career out of working for a cause that the public deeply cares about. The big corps know this and try to avoid PR problems but it seems like Apple has gotten real bold as of late and I look forward to seeing what comes of this.
He took a principled stand and risked he’s whole business and I appreciate that. If apple would enforce the same rules for everyone I think people would give them some slack. But as it stands, they don’t.
2) This site is not built by the people who built Hey.
3) The rules are being asymmetrically applied. Why should people be OK with Apple bullying all the companies they think they can get away with bullying?
> Do you want a successful business? Ok, then follow the rules, cover your ass, and do what you need to do to get your business going, even if it’s not always the ideal situation for you.
Not to pick on your bio too much, but I'm wondering if you may be having difficulty understanding the situation as a self described "ethically challenged software engineer working for a major tech company". But, you'll never get a new business off the ground successfully if you "follow the rules, cover your ass, ..." because the incumbents you are competing with are already doing that.
As I've ranted about before, running a startup is about taking calculated risks. You need to fight these fights if you think they have a high positive expected value. As sibling commentators explained, you do not always do this for altruistic reasons -- picking fights with a Goliath when you're a David is easy free PR for you.
Now granted, this kind of easy, free PR might be a drop in the bucket if you're a BigCo. And on the other hand, the expected risk might be high enough that the tradeoff really doesn't work out in your favor in that situation! But that is because the strategy for handling this kind of a setback is really not fungible from running a startup to running a BigCo.
Google scrapes info and displays it in widgets above links to the actual content. Google charges trademark holders AdWords ransom to protect searches for their own brands.
Amazon kills OSS business models by offering managed OSS services on AWS at an unbeatable cost. Amazon picks off the best performing market place categories with Amazon Basics ‘recommended’ competitors.
The list goes on and on.
Tech is an industry defined on building scale and then collecting rents. Apple IAP is just the current outrage but the entire industry is working towards building the next ‘platform’ for others to sharecrop on.
Why do they need to benefit the OSS provider? The license doesn't contain anything suggesting otherwise.
If authors want credit and money, the license needs to state as much. You can't publish something saying "do whatever you want" and then complain that people aren't being fair to you.
My parents asked me for some money the other day, but I told them to pound sand--if they wanted my help they should have made me sign something before they gave me all that free room and board. Suckers!
1 point by Grimm1 8 minutes ago | edit | delete [–]
The licenses weren't conceived of with the thought of something like AWS. Now that we're in the midst of things that's changing but what is an officially supported open source license [0] is too slow so you can't use the OSS label if you've you're not using the approved licenses. Both Mongo and Elasticsearch have changed their licenses to prevent cloud players from taking advantage of their work and companies like Gitlab make a clear distinction between their FOSS parts and what they make money on by using two different licenses.
The issues are only a little over a half decade old now the OSS players are starting to figure it out.
Open source just doesn't mean anyone can use it, there's a definition to adhere to and and org managing that definition. [1]
> The licenses weren't conceived of with the thought of something like AWS.
You mean...a hosting company? I find it hard to believe that the open source movement was blindsided by the realization that there are companies that sell hosting services and that somehow this destroys the viability of their movement.
But isn't that part of the point of open source? If you want people to have to pay for it in some way, it needs to be part of the license. The license is essentially free for all.
Legality doesn't always cover everything because that would result in a lot of problems. People operate on the spirit of the law, not the actual words or at least they are supposed to.
The licenses weren't conceived of with the thought of something like AWS. Now that we're in the midst of things that's changing but what is an officially supported open source license [0] is too slow so you can't use the OSS label if you've you're not using the approved licenses. Both Mongo and Elasticsearch have changed their licenses to prevent cloud players from taking advantage of their work and companies like Gitlab make a clear distinction between their FOSS parts and what they make money on by using two different licenses.
The issues are only a little over a half decade old now the OSS players are starting to figure it out.
Open source just doesn't mean anyone can use it, there's a definition to adhere to and and org managing that definition. [1]
Open-source software has large positive externalities and if those are being captured by private entities then this will pretty much lead to a demise of open source software, or open-source software will slowly but surely being turned into software that is more and more incompatible and de-facto in-house software.
This is already happening. A lot of projects that are nominally open source are more and more influenced by the decisions of particular companies which erodes its purpose.
> A lot of projects that are nominally open source are more and more influenced by the decisions of particular companies which erodes its purpose.
I might be ignorant here, but isn’t it the “open source companies” that are actively doing this, rather than Amazon? It seems to me that these companies that represent an open source project are realizing that you don’t get it both ways: it turns out that releasing open source software means that the source code is open, which means that you don’t get automatic business just because the name of your company is the same as the name of the open source project.
On a more general tone, does anti trust cover knowingly destroying communities and open source tools?
All the problems from app store racket still applies such as the tax. And I am not saying android doesn't need a lot of those changes, it's just they break things without helping. There are many examples if you look around.
Even if you search the exact name, it will bombard you with whoever is paying the most.
2. Google closed source their play billing library recently. Apps which use the library can't be put on fdroid.
3. At Google I/O 2018, Google introduced an alternative app distribution format called the Android App Bundle with the file extension .aab. This format requires giving a copy of your app’s signing key to Google. AABs are harder for users to manually sideload as they aren’t natively supported by Android’s package installer and must be unpacked and devs have to do more work to distribute on other platforms.
4. Google killing Termux with Android 10 and many others relying on the functionality by removing the perms to execute binaries.
5. Fdroid can't auto update because of restrictions by google.
6. Broke custom recoveries such as TWRP.
7. Irresponsible automated ban of anything covid. Surprisingly this doesn't or never affect popular apps. Must be because they whitelist them.
I wonder how Microsoft would do in the mobile market right now if they came in with the same developer first attitude we're seeing everywhere else.
Microsoft hardware with Android, a decent update lifecycle, MS365, alternate store, MS billing APIs, etc. would make a compelling offering IMO. The only thing I think MS would screw up would be sideloading. They seem to be all in on the current code signing / trust system and it's absolute trash.
There are so many industries that have been turned into complete garbage by rent seekers that I feel like anything that doesn't absolutely screw developers and customers would be super successful. The problem is that we only have about 5 tech companies on the planet that are big enough to compete.
> 3. At Google I/O 2018, Google introduced an alternative app distribution format called the Android App Bundle with the file extension .aab. This format requires giving a copy of your app’s signing key to Google. AABs are harder for users to manually sideload as they aren’t natively supported by Android’s package installer and must be unpacked and devs have to do more work to distribute on other platforms.
App bundle is a way to reduce hassle of uploading multiple apks for cutting down apk size on different targets. Developers can and always have to build regular apks for other distribution platforms or for users to sideload. I don't see how AAB makes devs do more work.
I can use Google Chrome, and still use a non-Google search engine. I can use a Kindle, and still read DRM-Free epubs.
Yes, all the major tech companies are engaged in rent seeking. But Apple is the only one that says users must either must pay rent or throw away their hardware.
The App Store and its policies are not the problem. The App Store is Apple's store, just like Amazon.com is Amazon's store. But the App Store shouldn't be the only way to get software on my phone. And no, reinstalling apps from a computer every seven days doesn't count.
(The semi-exceptions are game consoles. I don't like that either, but since they're single-purpose devices I find it much less bad.)
Yeah I think we can draw a bit of a line from they were a major game not on the Play Store and now they're a major game on the Play Store - my guess is barely anyone sideloaded it.
I think they've faced antitrust things around the dominance of the app store, however do they actually do the same thing as apple here? I can find a story online of tinder switching to asking users to enter their credit card details in the app.
I can’t relate to this. Some vendors sell me hardware, and I can bring my own software. Apple sells me more expensive hardware with the software only from their “partners”, which is “curated” and subject to a steep 30% distribution cut. Apple never tricked me into an iPhone believing I could run any random software. I know what I signed up for. Why should I feel entitled to anything else?
Why should software makers share their revenue with Apple? We don’t do it on android, Windows, macOS, linux, or anything else.
The only value added by Apple is some kind of vetting (they don’t do code review, they just check that the app meets their recommendations... and they are called RECOMMENDATIONS not REQUIEMENTS).
My app was recently rejected because i refused to sell in-app purchases and want to keep purchases only on my website.
> Why should software makers share their revenue with Apple?
Why should Apple care what software makers want?
I get that it's a pain to develop software for the iPhone and then have to pay rent to Apple to get it to users; but that's not Apple's problem unless enough users either complain or switch hardware to cut into Apple's revenue. That doesn't seem to be happening. Sure, there are plenty of users (I'm one of them) who refuse to buy an Apple device precisely because of limitations like this, but there are plenty more users who don't seem to care; whatever they are getting through Apple's curated app store appears to satisfy their needs. As long as that remains true, Apple has no incentive to change its policies, and that's just a business reality that any software developer contemplating making an app for the iPhone is going to have to deal with.
I don't think he is defending it, I think he is correctly rationalising that this is the effect of devs and users buying into Apple's walled Garden. This is what devs and users caused by supporting the Google Apple duopoly. You bought in you play by their rules.
Personally I think devs should just pass the 30% to consumers or withdraw their apps. That is how you get leverage.
The Mafia didn't build things. It just came in and took over things others had built.
Apple built its app store. It built the iPhone. It got its users fair and square, by providing a product that users want. If you think that's the same as the Mafia, you have a very skewed view of business.
But they also prevent other stores from being built. And they prevent sideloading. It's their store or nothing. They created a marketplace and ban other marketplaces. wtf?
They do no such thing. They just prevent other stores from providing apps for their own product. Which they are within their rights to do, since it's their product.
Why does the pet store down the street from my apartment have a storefront on Amazon? Because they want access to Amazon’s customer base and are willing to pay for it.
GP asked "why software makers should share their revenue with Apple" and said "nothing else" is like that. I was just pointing examples of things that were exactly like that.
As for the why: I'm thinking from the point of view of a developer. For me it's all the same. Paying 30% to Apple is the same as paying 30% to Steam or x% to console makers. In practice it doesn't matter if the appliance the user runs my software is essential or not, or if the store is exclusive, or comes preinstalled or not. I'm still paying a percentage to someone.
Well, I don't think paying 30% to Apple is the same as paying 30% to Steam. The former is mandatory, the latter is not. If you don't want to be on Steam, you can put your game in the Windows store/etc, or sell directly from your website. If you don't want to be on Apple's app store, well, too bad, it's the only way to reach 50+% of your potential customers (in the US).
In theory, yes. In practice, not publishing a game on Steam will also alienate you from a large amount of potential customers. We're only starting to see change recently. But I understand your point and agree in principle. What's your opinion on consoles, though?
I know quite a few people on Steam who simply refuse to but any games on any platforms other than Steam. Steam isn't an exclusive choice, but there's a nontrivial number of gamers who are loyal to Steam to the point of refusing to purchase anything that isn't available on Steam.
I personally have platforms I simply will not use (or refuse to spend money on directly, like EA's Origin, where I only own/care about C&C) regardless how good of a deal it is.
Valve has the ability to set whatever rules they want within their store. A world where we didn't allow this would get very complicated very quickly. Do we also make Walmart and Target carry every brand? How much are they allowed to markup the price? Who decides?
If Steam provides such a valuable service that consumers aren't willing to shop anywhere else even when they can, then that's what it is.
And, I think that's what would largely happen on the iPhone anyway if side-loading was allowed, outside of extraordinary circumstances like when protesters can't access a critical safety app. But, in order to keep apps on their store, Apple would have to make a (slightly) greater effort to keep developers happy.
(I also think Steam zealots are ridiculous, but that is a separate discussion.)
There's another option to sideloading... permitting other marketplaces to exist. They ban that, too. Both sideloading and alternate marketplaces have an impact on android and windows (non-steam markets). Why wouldn't such things have an impact on iphone?
It’s totally optional; if you don’t want to participate, don’t. Sell your software any way you want outside their store. Take out ads in local papers or something.
So don’t sell iPhone versions. Sell software for platforms that support arbitrary software. Or pay Apple for distribution in their walled garden. It’s totally up to you.
The parameters have been clear for over a decade, and it’s really time to stop whining that the iPhone is not an open platform. Apple is the only iPhone app distribution channel and they make the rules. If you don’t want that, don’t buy an iPhone/don’t make iPhone apps. If you make iPhone apps, own it.
And the other alternative is that governments get involved to force apple to allow other markets on their phones. Ones that charge 5% or ones that are even free.
Instead of, you know, just accepting bad things because
they've been bad for a decade. Slavery was around in the
US for more than 100 years. Did that make it right? Maybe slave owners said similar things to Abolitionists, "but it's been this way for ages!!"
What stores take 30% lifetime subscription royalties for products sold on their shelves?
Can you imagine if Best Buy required Apple to add "Best Buy Payments" to MacOS so that Best Buy could collect a 30% fee on top of any services subscription that Apple sells to that MacBook user? All for the privilege of selling their products through the BB stores.
Apple isn't marking up a product for resale in it's retail environments. It is, in many cases, forcing its developers (who provide their valuable products to Apple for free, after paying Apple an annual fee) to completely rearrange their business models in order for Apple to collect a huge portion of their revenues, entirely on their terms.
It doesn’t matter. These are the terms of the store. If Walmart makes clear an expectation that you have to have an office in Arkansas in order to sell an item in their store, then you shouldn’t be surprised when your item is rejected from their store if you don’t build that office. There’s no expectation that you’d have free placement, certainly.
As for your Best Buy example, Best Buy can make that demand, but Best Buy would lose more from not having Apple’s products than Apple would from not being placed on Best Buy’s shelves.
I agree completely - Apple can have whatever terms it wants within the bounds of the law. And app developers have every right to complain about those terms, loudly and in a sustained fashion, if they wish.
The second part there is what a lot of people seem to have difficulty accepting.
It’s easy to accept that you have a right to complain. But after ten years of perfect clarify about how Apple intends to play this, your supposed outrage that the iPhone is still a walled garden seems willfully thick.
I’d be so impressed if one of you would just head over to Android and make a non-iPhone app that took the world by storm. Prove to us all that the 30% is a bad bargain, that Apple needs to change, that your software is valuable even without their store.
I guess it’s disheartening to see instead just another set of entitled complaints and dubious concern over end users, most of whom have no idea your $10 app exists and never thought about it when buying their $1000 phone.
Companies have certainly complained, loudly and in a sustained fashion, about dealing with certain brick-and-mortar stores over the years.
(Apple is in a frustratingly unique position compared to Walmart, Target, Best Buy, et. al., of course, in that the App Store is the way to get applications onto iPhones.)
Your Apple hardware is your Costco Membership Card. You aren’t able to buy Sam’s Club products using your Costco membership, and Costco’s under no expectation to make them available to you.
But I can buy a fridge at Costco, buy food from Sam's Club, and still store my food in my fridge. I don't have to throw out Costco's fridge in order to buy food elsewhere.
Some things are compatible and some things are not.
Edit: “Compatible” is not about the tech in this case (the binary would theoretically run) but about the terms of your agreement with the manufacturer.
If you buy a Costco fridge and with it a contract to only store Costco-sold food in it, then you have a better analogy. 80% of the world seems to prefer the AnyFood Fridge, and for some reason 20% buy the Costco with the agreement.
Sorry, I don't understand where you're going with this. There's an updated Hey app on the developer's computer which is compatible with my iPhone, but Apple isn't letting me install it.
--
Edit response: How many people do you think read the agreement they signed with Apple? How many realize Apple is increasing the price of software by ~30%?
Nonsense. The App Store is the Store. For god's sake, it's literally called a store. This couldn't be clearer.
You don't need to muddy the waters by making a ridiculous analogy that somehow equates a computer to a membership card (of all things!).
The computer is a computer. Full stop. There is a store on the computer. There should be other stores on the computer but they're not allowed because the people that make the computer are partaking in anti-competitive, anti-consumer shenanigans.
> I know what I signed up for. Why should I feel entitled to anything else?
It's interesting you'd say that because it's actually not true (I am not accusing you of lying at all - I take your statement at face value!)
What I mean is the following:
When I buy a phone - no matter the maker - I have deep within me a default assumption that if I want some app, some provider, some service, some feature, on my phone - that it will be, that it can be, and if someone thinks it up it'll be there shortly. I DO NOT assume that because Apple wants to steal people's work, some apps will never appear there.
Do you remember the early days of the app store and the saying "There's an app for that" (usually referring to things like fart generators and TV quotes).
Nowadays you'd NEVER think to say such a thing because Apple is ensuring it cannot be true - and more and more developers and platforms are choosing not to use it.
It's pretty plainly clear to me that Apple ONLY wants large, rich, well-known companies publishing apps; they grudgingly publish apps for small or individual developers, but really deep down wish they didn't have to.
Stuff like what we are seeing now with Hey is their endgame to finally get everyone except their exclusive club off the list.
Fortunately i still have an Android phone and Android tablet where such things still exist (and i use them regularly). So I kept the iPhone because I also develop for the platform now.
Apple is not tricking people into buying iPhones, believing every app is available. “There’s an app for that” doesn’t mean “every single app for that is available”. It means there are many apps, all of which found 30% to be acceptable.
If Apple had promised customers that Age of Empires runs on Macs, then they would have a hard time getting Microsoft to give them 30%. But Apple has made not such promise to consumers.
Besides, there’s an email client for the iPhone. If there wasn’t, consumers might complain. If Hey was the only game in town, I’m sure they’d be given a sweeter deal.
> If Apple had promised customers that Age of Empires runs on Macs, then they would have a hard time getting Microsoft to give them 30%. But Apple has made not such promise to consumers.
Given that Age of Empires has actually had Mac versions, I'm not sure this is the comparison you're looking for here. :)
I never said they're tricking anyone. Although, "There's an app for that" was actually a thing, or would you rather not remember that?
The POINT that I'm making is that people their phone is theirs and they can install what they want on it. Even if that thing comes from the app store. EVEN NOW when I want to do something I go looking for an app. I don't assume my phone can't do it. And I certainly don't assume it can't do it thanks to shenanigans on Apple's part.
The reality however is far different and there are LOTS of things Apple doesn't allow and they are not above using their platform to stifle competition.
Implication being “there’s an app for” a number of needs, but not that “there’s every app” for every need.
When the case in point is an email client this argument seems especially facetious. Is any customer really being defrauded because “there’s not an app for email”?
>I know what I signed up for. Why should I feel entitled to anything else?
Maybe you are happy with one of the 2 shitty choices, but there might be people that would prefer to not be forced to chose what shit taste better, it is live you live in place and you have only 2 drinking water choices, both contain different poisons but you have a choice, why should people complain and try to fix a bad situation when you could chose your poison? I seen lots complaining that there is not enough competiotion in X or Y market (like mobile or ISPs ) but Apple fans don't want more competition on the iOS, you wouild thinkt he average Apple user would have been already scammed 100 times on their Macbooks because of the missing walls , this is how hard the security excuse is mentioned.
I don’t agree with that explanation of the gaming console exception. Modern consoles are actually quite similar to smartphones in the breadth of their functionality. To be consistent I think you’d need to include consoles, most smart TVs and media streamers, and even tech-heavy cars.
My concern with phones isn't really that they're general-purpose per se, but that they're many people's primary computer--if not their only computer. Game consoles don't have that level of importance in our lives.
Gaming consoles aren't general purpose computers. You're not going to do banking, email your boss, find a lover, or order groceries from them. They're unnecessary leisure commodities.
There are also three major consoles, PC, Steam, and a ton of other ways to distribute games. It's a highly competitive landscape. If you want a phone, you've got only two options.
DOJ, burn the Apple and Google monopolies to the ground.
I think gaming consoles are general purpose computers. You listed a few things that probably aren't done very often on consoles (although you likely can do them, since consoles have web browsers). But it's also easy to list things that are much better-suited to be done on a gaming console than a smartphone.
> I think gaming consoles are general purpose computers.
This is a contrived point of view, and I'm sure the product managers at Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Apple, and Google would all strongly disagree.
Remember when the PS3 used to be used for super computing? Sony quietly ended that program when they realized that wasn't the business they wanted to be in.
I don't mean that consoles are the best device to do any computing task. Of course they aren't, and of course smartphones also are not. I'm also not making some technical claim, like that they are Turing complete (of course they are, but that's not really relevant). What I mean is that I do not consider modern consoles to be "single-purpose computers." They're more like "the computer for your living room," and they can and often do handle all sorts of media/entertainment and communication/socializing (which, let's be honest, is a huge part of what smartphones do). They can also handle home automation. If you consider "anything you would want to do on your living room TV" to be a single purpose, then sure, but you could construct the same definition for a smartphone.
> If you want a phone, you've got only two options.
That's not true at all. There's 2 primary OS choices, but on the Android side there's dozens of manufacturers, all with their take on things. Android is not a single option, it's hundreds. You even have choice of app stores. There's even options that have zero Google at all - like the Huawei P40 Pro. Or for an older take, silent cirlce's Blackphone or Amazon's Fire Phone. And even if you are in the very small minority that actually buys a Google phone, they even provide instructions on how to unlock the bootloader & flash a different OS: https://source.android.com/setup/build/running#unlocking-rec...
Android if Google as far as I am concerned, for now. Lets hope Huawei gets it's store off the ground fast. But for now: no Google Play Service, and Android is a brick.
Consoles are very different from phones. Consoles sell at a loss and make the money back in sales. The 30% cut to the console makers goes towards paying for the lower price of hardware. Google and Apple do not sell phones below cost.
The certification process for consoles is also a lot tougher and more expensive.
These things are true; and also a significant component of Apple's value proposition. An Apple customer can be sure they will:
1) Never need to learn what a "sideload" is
2) Never be exposed to Apps that havn't been vetted by a trustworthy party (in this case Apple)
Apple is taking the opportunity to milk app developers, but they've done an effective job of positioning the milking process so that it is done in the user's interests. It is quite possible that things like this 30% App Store tax are one of the reasons why iPhones remain so prominent.
Apple should then rent their hardware out then or provide long-term leasing. If Apple is selling devices for ownership, then the device should truly be owned. I would rather they be honest, and lease the device out (even for a fixed sum for an unlimited period of time), than to claim ownership.
> An Apple customer can be sure they will: (1) Never need to learn what a "sideload" is, and (2) never be exposed to Apps that haven't been vetted by a trustworthy party.
But Apple customers can be sure of that anyway--just don't sideload apps. Anything essential is going to want to be in the App Store, in order to reach customers.
>If they became a cultural phenomenon I'd bet that Apple would magically reinterpret their rules.
Please trust me on this but, even if your app is far and away the #1 grossing app on the app store and hundreds of media outlets have literally used the term "cultural phenomenon" to describe it, Apple is still a huge stickler on the rules and it still takes forever (and a lot of stress) to get approved, every single update.
This applies even if your CEO has Tim Cook's personal cellphone number and talked to him about the issues with app store approval a week before, in person.
Yes, but Apple would have a lot less power if developers could threaten (even theoretically) to go around the App Store.
Even now, major apps do have power. Unlike Hey, Netflix and Amazon are at least still in the App Store, and Amazon is even allowed to sell video rentals through their app without going through Apple's payment system: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/1/21203294/amazon-prime-vide...
Edit: My posts probably read like contradictions. I see it like this: (1) The safe and vetted App Store is a part of the iPhone's appeal, which (2) Apple is currently enforcing through anti-competitive tactics. If Apple wants to maintain the App Store as a product differentiator (which of course they do), they should have to do the work to keep developers happy. Where "keep happy" means very basic things like not taking a full 30% of their revenue.
Netflix and Amazon Prime Video as digital video content providers are specifically exempted from the IAP rules according to section 3.1.3(a) of the App Store review guidelines.
> But Apple customers can be sure of that anyway--just don't sideload apps.
Well, no. At some point they'd need to know what it is to decide if they wanted it or not. At some point they'd encounter an App that isn't in the App store and have to figure out sideloading. We've got a whole heap of people commenting here today who give off a distinct "I want to bypass the App Store" vibe. User hat on, I'd rather they were forced to use it.
I don't think there is enough reflecting here on just how critical a phone is. At the extremes, the US government sometimes targets predator drones based on phone GPS. I suspect an enormous number of phones contain compromising pictures. Phones contain detailed logs of where I am, who I'm talking to, and potentially access to actual records of what was said.
I really don't want to be in a situation where 'Wowfunhappy' is executing arbitrary unknown code on a phone owned by me or my family. I don't want Google and Facebook browsing through and indexing this stuff either. Apple isn't even a good gatekeeper, but they are much better than nothing.
> I don't think there is enough reflecting here on just how critical a phone is.
But see, I'm think that's exactly what I'm doing--the app store gives China an easy way to take safety apps from protestors. A phone is too important for it to be out of the user's control.
I understand the security implications, but when I weigh the societal issues, Apple's model seems much more dangerous.
So the solution to not making people want to sideload is to not let anybody sideload? I hate solving problems by destroying value. It's like solving the real problem of wealth inequality by taking billions from the rich and dropping it in the ocean.
Maybe... Just putting this out there. Just maybe... Instead of having your phone double as an ad delivery platform, and actually fully embracing Open hardware/software standards, and making sure the innards of your phone's operating principles are absolutely visible to you, you wouldn't have to trust your safety to people that look at you like cattle.
Imagine a world, where your Telco or anyone else for that matter can't remotely tell your phone to turn on. A world where you and only you have ultimate control over your phone, and where instead of millions of engineer hours going into making your phone convenient for developers to utilize, it is instead made easier for the user to actually understand.
That is the world I want to see. Hell I want to be part of making. I'll be damned if I can figure out how to make it work with our Market's current optimization function.
I mean, I agree with you. I'm right there with you. But you and I both know that that model won't work for most people. They'll be in the same place they are today—having to trust when other people tell them their phone is safe.
Incidentally, to the last paragraph, you can help make it work—go work on Linux mobile UX/UI. Things like the PinePhone and the Purism Librem 5 exist, and there's a market for them, they're just missing a polished user experience.
It's not the developers that are being milked up, it's the consumers. The 30% tax is transferred over to you by having a higher price when buying from the IAP.
I see this a lot, and to be honest, this 'Apple products are free from malware' meme has been carried on as long as I can remember in one form or another since the early Mac days. The amount of people that used to say they used Macs because 'they didn't have viruses' is about the same as the people who say 'I use iphones because Apple makes sure I'm safe'.
It's been Apple's marketing strategy for a long time, despite being slightly exaggerated, early Macs did have viruses and yes, malware makes its way onto the app store.
But Apple's marketing strategy sure has been working a long time.
And yet, even after being vetted malware still gets in
I don't remember ever seeing Apple promise that 100% of apps will be 100% safe 100% of the time. Can you provide a link?
Apple's review process is done by people. People make mistakes. Things get through when bad people are trying to hide that they're doing bad things. But I'll take Apple's 1-in-a-million mistake environment over the anything goes Android environment.
> These things are true; and also a significant component of Apple's value proposition
You're describing the value of an app store, not the App Store. So the problem is not the value proposition, the problem is Apple's monopoly on this value proposition. It is why we can't have a Google iOS App Store, Microsoft iOS App store etc. list from which the user can pick, which would completely satisfy the convenience and peace of mind criterion, would increase competition regarding the cuts, vetting quality, curation quality etc.
Webapps, period. (I agree that resource heavy games are the exception; given that I consider music production a form of play, the difference is fleeting, incidently consoles are famous in this space, too; contrast that with your basic map, analogue to sheet music, lol).
No, I don't want to install your lousy app that's only a front-end to your web service anyway. Of course it gives you more control and opportunity for certain features. This only means that web browsers still have a long way to go. If apps were reasonably small, maybe I could install more of them, but as it is, it's just impossible.
I feel it pertinent to point out that comments like yours help keep the status quo.
Pointing out that apple is not alone in a thread trying to raise awareness about apple's practices both distracts from apple's unethical behavior and contributes to normalizing the behavior in public perception.
So my question to you is: do you want to see these unethical behaviors end? or continue?
Why is it unethical to charge a fee to developers who want to distribute their software through an app store that Apple owns?
I get that it's unpleasant for developers who don't like the policy, and at some point it might have business consequences for Apple if they don't change the policy, but why is it unethical?
Think of a flee market.
Lets say this flee market runs their own PoS system that tables can use, they require all sales happen via this PoS system "to protect customers from hacking", and they charge a percentage for providing this service, higher then normal under the guise that the transaction is being conducted on their property, they are "hosting" the "sale" under their roof, so they set the terms for it. Seems fair and good, ish
Now lets say that they also own the city bank, and they are the only one allowed to take their bank's debit card as payment. Most people don't use the other, newer bank because everybody they know is using the flee markets bank as it was first. So if you want to take credit card payments you have to sale at the flee market.
Is it still fair and good for them to continue to set all terms relating to how sales are conducted in a selfish way when they have a monopoly gained in part from first mover advantage? eh, maybe, maybe not.
Now they say that if you sale any spare parts or consumables for a product that was originally sold at the flee market, you must only do so at the flee market.
Is it still fair and good for them to use the fact that the transaction is happening on their property to set higher fees on these follow up transactions when they require these follow up transactions to happen on their property? While exploiting a first mover advantage that causes more of the initial transactions to happen on their property?
Never forget that you can't just look at each piece, the whole matters too.
Each individual piece of the macro is ethically an "eh" at most, but the whole is a bit more then "eh"
Taxes are paid by the consumer. Ideally developers should price things based on how much revenue they want per transaction, and have the 30% fee shown to the user.
If that were the case, there would be nothing unethical about a 30% tax nor a 90% tax.
Therefore, it’s not the size that’s the problem, but the fact that the tax isn’t communicated to the consumer, and also that Apple wants you to charge the same price in-app as elsewhere (though I’m not sure if that part is enforced)
So what determines how large the fee has to be for it to be unethical? I don't see any principled way to decide, which makes me doubt your argument here.
I think it would be ethical to charge a fee to distribute software. You can imagine a world where each upload to the App Store would cast say $100. But the issue people complain about is that they are forced to use Apple as a middleman for all their payments and that Apple charges exorbitant fees for this
Make it a web site. Make it an Android exclusive. Do any of the dozen other things you need to do to be a success. You don't have to be on the App Store to survive. Hundreds of thousands of developers and their programs aren't.
Making it a website is inconvenient for many reasons compared to an app. Making it Android exclusive sucks for people who have iPhones, and it's a tall order to ask anyone to switch away from an iPhone they have already purchased. The problem is categorically not solved here.
>Why is it unethical to charge a fee to developers who want to distribute their software through an app store that Apple owns?
This is only part of the complaint, right? The other parts is that:
* Apple has the only keys to the hardware platform.
* This is in contrast to Google or Steam, who also charge 30%, but do not completely own access to their respective hardware platforms.
* This is also in contrast to physical stores, because if a store does not sell a product (i.e. a grocery store chain does not carry some brand of beer), the product owner can usually still put it somewhere else that the consumer can freely access (excluding transportation costs).
* The policy regarding whether Apple should be entitled to the subscription fee is inconsistent and full of exceptions, which this website illustrates. My cynical take is that these exceptions have no real philosophy behind them, other than the fact that Apple needed certain major apps to be on iOS (i.e. Netflix, Tesla, Bloomberg, etc.).
* Slightly separate point, but still relevant: if Apple is entitled to subscription fees, Apple can make competitors that undercut other subscription services like Spotify, because they don't have to pay themselves the 30% fee. This is what Spotify complained about last year, and what I believe the EU is looking at. [1]
The fourth bullet point is the most egregious to me. These policies are so overbearing that they're actually untenable, but Apple just gets around that by arbitrarily giving exceptions to companies that are big enough to affect their bottom line.
It's the part I'm interested in. I get that Apple's policy is a pain in the ass to a lot of developers, that Apple is inconsistent and arbitrary about how it applies that policy, and that all this greatly restricts developer access to users of Apple's hardware. What I don't get is how any of this is unethical. Bothersome and irritating, yes, but why unethical?
> Why is it unethical to charge a fee to developers who want to distribute their software through an app store that Apple owns?
Developer don't necessarily want to distribute their software through that app store, they are forced to do that if they want to sell their software to people who happen to use that operating system. Operating system and app store are distinct products, but app store exclusively gatekeeps the functionality the user can achieve through the operating system they bought.
If app store was a standalone offering that aimed to benefit the user, there shouldn't be any problem allowing multiple competing app stores people paid for the convenience of vetted and curated apps and letting the market forces decide the winner. That is obviously not happening.
Therefore, strongarming the ecosystem and stifling market dynamics is the unethical move here. Less competition, less innovation, less user benefit, less developer income (which translates into even less innovation) etc is the price everyone pays in aggregate in order for Apple to exact its rent, which goes to their idle pile of cash or comes back to humanity as a 0.002 grams lighter iPhone++ next year.
So you increase the price of your app by 30 to make up for Apple's cut%. It's called business. It happens all the time in every single industry.
If a business' property taxes go up, that cost is passed on to its customers. Why do people think that because something is on a phone that it should be any different?
That's also not allowed. I think Hey would be fine charging $142 a year for a subscription in their app, with a little note below saying "you can get this for $99 on our website, the difference is Apple's cut." In fact, if I understand it correctly, the price in-app has to be the same as the price anywhere else. They're literally not allowed to do what you're suggesting and pass the cost of Apple's fee on to consumers.
So Hey should boost their prices everywhere, even on their own site, to $142, so that they can make up Apple's cut? Which is what Apple demands. I don't think that's reasonable.
I think that you and I are broadly in agreement. If Hey were allowed to charge $142 in their iPhone app, and $99 on their website, I'd think that was much less ridiculous than the situation as it stands today.
> It's called business. It happens all the time in every single industry
And we call those situations market failures. Besides, in this case the market failure is due to a monopolistic mechanism, which doesn't happen "all the time in every industry". If we are going to do markets, let's do it properly.
Increasing price %30 causes a corresponding decrease in the demand, and in aggregate this can cause a decrease in the total profit. The fact that the developer is forced to set a new price point this way is a source of inefficiency for the entire app economy.
Besides forced price increase is not the only harm done by the monopoly of the App Store. As this website exemplifies, it has monopoly over ontological decisions (whether a certain type of app can exist or not), over design decisions (signups, in app purchases etc) and whatnot. These are further points of inefficiency or outright failure. Apple might or might not be doing a good enough job making the best out of these decisions, but the bottom line is we don't have a choice of another player emerging with potentially better choice-making and therefore a better app store.
To the extent that this situation is a "market failure", it's not one that's fixable except by users changing their preferences.
> in this case the market failure is due to a monopolistic mechanism
Apple only has a "monopoly" on their own app store because they built it. Users are not being forced to use iPhones; they choose to because they believe iPhones give them better value overall than the alternatives. That's called free market competition, not monopoly.
> it's not one that's fixable except by users changing their preferences.
By definition market failures can't be fixed by market dynamics. That is why state does tons of interventions/regulations to make it work.
> That's called free market competition, not monopoly.
No. Vertical integration means there is no free market at the integration point to begin with, which integration of a software application store with a physical phone is. We are talking about a $50bil/year market that is not free.
> By definition market failures can't be fixed by market dynamics.
That's why I put "market failure" in quotes. If you think anything fixable by users changing their preferences isn't a "market failure" by your definition, fine, then the Apple situation is not a market failure by your definition.
> That is why state does tons of interventions/regulations to make it work.
No, the government does tons of interventions/regulations to favor particular market players, under the guise of "fixing market failures". In almost all cases, these interventions/regulations actually make things worse overall, but of course they make things better for the particular market players that were favored.
> Vertical integration means there is no free market at the integration point to begin with
Throwing around buzzwords proves nothing. Apple created the iPhone and its app store. It can do whatever it wants with them because it owns them. It has the market share it has because users have freely chosen to use its products instead of those of its competitors. That's the essence of a free market. The fact that you don't like doesn't make it not a free market.
These are technical terms, not buzzwords and calling them so doesn't make much of a counter-argument.
> That's the essence of a free market
No it is not. You seem to equate free market with unregulated market which is not always true. Markets fail to self-regulate in the absence of open competition, which is what precisely the App Store on iPhone is. Nearly half of the mobile phone apps in the US comes from a closed market. Imagine instead Apple owned half of the roads in the US and stipulated what businesses could use those roads, e.g. only certain grocery store's trucks can deliver goods over them. That would be far from a free market too.
The technical definitions of these terms don't support the claims you are making using them, so you're not using them as technical terms, you're using them as buzzwords.
> You seem to equate free market with unregulated market
Not at all. A free market is regulated by the voluntary choices of market participants.
> Markets fail to self-regulate in the absence of open competition
So your definition of "open competition" is "Apple can't choose the terms on which it is going to provide products and services that it built itself". By that definition, "open competition" has nothing whatever to do with "free market", since in a free market every market participant gets to choose the terms on which it is going to provide goods and services that it built itself. Forcing market participants to provide goods and services on terms they would not choose for themselves is not a free market.
> Imagine instead Apple owned half of the roads in the US and stipulated what businesses could use those roads
Roads are not the same as smartphones or apps; roads are exclusive in a way that smartphones and apps are not.
> If app store was a standalone offering that aimed to benefit the user, there shouldn't be any problem allowing multiple competing app stores people paid for the convenience of vetted and curated apps and letting the market forces decide the winner.
And if all that would benefit users more, users would be demanding it, or switching from iPhone to something else. But they're not. Users seem overall to be quite satisfied with what they are getting from their iPhones. So your claim here appears to be empirically false.
> strongarming the ecosystem and stifling market dynamics is the unethical move here
All this depends on your factual claim above being true, which, as I have noted, it appears not to be, based on actual user behavior.
But let's put that aside and assume that your factual claim is true. If that makes what Apple is doing unethical, then probably every single large corporation on the planet is unethical. Certainly every large corporation in the tech industry is. They all do these things; they just don't all do them with an app store.
> Users seem overall to be quite satisfied with what they are getting from their iPhones. So your claim here appears to be empirically false.
A lack of reduction in observable demand doesn't imply an absence of cost.
Let's say the cost of having a singular app store for the user can be expressed as 99$, but the average utility they derive from using their iPhone is valued at 100$. It would be rational for that user to still prefer iPhone despite incurring great cost and we wouldn't see any drop in demand.
> Certainly every large corporation in the tech industry is. They all do these things; they just don't all do them with an app store.
That is appeal to tradition. Indeed, monopolistic nature of tech combined with vertical integration is a large unsolved problem of our era and it haven't completely played out yet.
> A lack of reduction in observable demand doesn't imply an absence of cost.
Waving your hands and throwing random numbers around doesn't imply a presence of cost.
> That is appeal to tradition.
It is no such thing. I'm just trying to figure out what your actual position is.
> monopolistic nature of tech combined with vertical integration is a large unsolved problem
Which makes it clearer what your position is: you think the problem with tech is "monopolistic nature combined with vertical integration".
I disagree. I think the problem with tech is that it is giving away valuable things for free, or selling them at or below cost, in order to capture users and sell their data and their eyeballs or corner markets. Apple is actually the least guilty of this of the major tech players; I'm far more worried about Google and Facebook and Amazon than I am about Apple. But at any rate, that problem is not a problem of monopoly and vertical integration. It's a problem of shortsightedness in general--putting short term gain and convenience over long term stability and trust.
> Waving your hands and throwing random numbers around doesn't imply a presence of cost.
Come on, let's not go in circles. I posited there is a cost to user in being locked into a single app store. You claimed if there was such cost, we necessarily would have seen decrease in user demand. My handwaving numbers were to demonstrate that it doesn't have to be true, there can be substantial user costs without any decrease in user demand.
> giving away valuable things for free, or selling them at or below cost, in order to capture users and sell their data and their eyeballs or corner markets
You're close but not there. Being able to give away things for free come from the giant profits accumulated through monopolistic vertical integration. Google has a compute platform that runs a search engine/youtube that sells adds that is viewed through their browser that runs on their mobile phone. Those are multiple integration points (though not all are monopolistic). If for example Google were to pay for an external compute platform that is not theirs, they would have to pay for the profit margin of the service provider, but without is all of that money stays within the company, and that is one of the factors that enable them "giving away valuable things for free".
Data integration is a completely different game. Selling data to outside is the least powerful way to make money out of it, especially if you have other data and products. It is akin to a 3rd world country selling their raw resources. What makes the most money is the integration of multiple data sources through multiple products and even 3rd party vendors. The magic of an SQL join is that joining table-a and table-b can yield more information that neither a and b had alone. When you join the data of a browser and a search engine and 3rd party information you bought to sell more clickable ads, that is when the most money is made out of the data. The more money you make, the more you can run loss leaders, buy competitors, create barriers of entry (a la app stores), and meanwhile damage the entire ICT ecosystem in the name of even more money. That is why ensuring market health is important.
> I posited there is a cost to user in being locked into a single app store.
And the person to judge that question is the user, not two people having an argument on an Internet site. And not app developers either.
> You claimed if there was such cost, we necessarily would have seen decrease in user demand.
I said that if there is no discernible change in user demand, that means the users, who are the ones in a position to judge, evidently don't see a significant enough cost to change their behavior. Any change in the cost-benefit relationship will change the behavior of some users. Sure, they won't all switch from iPhones to something else, but some percentage of them will.
> Being able to give away things for free come from the giant profits accumulated through monopolistic vertical integration.
No, it comes from having some other source of revenue besides the users of the thing that is being given away for free. "Monopolistic vertical integration" might help in getting other sources of revenue, but it's not the root problem. The root problem is that the actual users of the service are not the paying customers, someone else is, so the incentives of the provider are skewed.
Let's assume the idea of Open Source is a network of small to medium-sized businesses and individual contributors helping each other out in a mutually beneficial way. A multi-billion dollar corp stepping in by undercutting those businesses' prices and taking without giving back anything of equal value is arguably against the spirit of the idea and a breach of trust. It's technically okay because it is just "accepting a gift" but I'd still say it's exploitation.
Distributing under a NC-license would also go against that idea. (Apart from tipping the perception of "Open Source" towards something more restrictive which is always a bit bitter.)
The key difference is that the App store is the only way of running apps on an iDevice outside of rooting it (which for >99% of users means it's the only way of running apps).
Apple needs to be transparent that it's not selling devices, it's licensing devices. Users do not control the devices they own.
> Google scrapes info and displays it in widgets above links to the actual content. Google charges trademark holders AdWords ransom to protect searches for their own brands.
All search engines do this. It doesn't depend on building scale and then exploiting it. The experience is better for the user.
> Amazon kills OSS business models by offering managed OSS services on AWS at an unbeatable cost.
All cloud providers do this. It also doesn't depend on building and exploiting scale. The experience is better for the user.
Developers that charge extraordinary amounts via subscription should be listed somewhere too, so we know who to avoid. BUDGE used to make children's games that unlocked for $5 - $15 one-time purchase, now the same size and caliber titles are each almost $100/year, just a big Apple-sponsored bet on zombie subscription fraud staying "acceptable" for a few more years till Apple fixes the problem they created that amplified their cash flow. Throughout it all we miss that the 30% isn't even getting us good custodians.
I don't care about Hey and I'm not an iOS user, but I would love to see this situation, which represents something increasingly accepted as normal but that none of us quite understand, forced into a proper accommodation with reality.
I know it's not part of the principle, but is there anything in the rules that says you can't charge an additional fee to those signing up using in app payments? If this is the hill Apple chooses to die on, every Apple customer just has to pay an additional 30ish% for a service, but of course you can always sign up online for the special sale price.
So nice for the people of Basecamp to be fighting the good fight for everyone and the small developers. It’s not like they were perfectly fine with the system as long as it didn’t affect them, being one of the “famous” companies out there, while independent developers and small start-ups had to deal with this for years and years.
I was excited about hey before, and even though I don’t agree and don’t like the way the App Store works, I find Hey and the superstars behind it so hypocritical and annoying now. It’s funny how we hate here AMP and other technologies that are killing the open web, but we’re fine with a closed email system that locks you in Basecamp’s walled garden.
I suppose you’re not affected by app store policies. Otherwise you’d be extremely grateful to DHH to step up and fight publicly, instead of trying to deal with apple in private or just cave in.
It has never felt so close to actually breaking up apple tight grip on its developer community, and it’s all thanks to him.
Because they are being ridiculous already. It’s one thing to help developers and try to bring up their stories and issues with the App Store, it’s another thing to come up with ridiculous examples (Tesla, banking apps, AirBnB and so on, that have nothing to to with SaaS, subscriptions and IAP) and this insane campaign for their own product.
It should be noted that this website is not created by Basecamp, but is a personal project by someone else. Yes, they are giving Hey free marketing, but this is not an official attempt at marketing Hey.
> I was excited about hey before, and even though I don’t agree and don’t like the way the App Store works, I find Hey and the superstars behind it so hypocritical and annoying now.
I don't understand this sentiment. You don't like the way the App Store works and a company comes along and is willing to fight against Apple for it, and then you start disliking them? Why are they hypocritical? They are pointing out flaws and being loud about them. Yes, I am aware that it's because it aligns with their financial/strategical interests, but ultimately it's a good thing that they are pressuring Apple, no?
> It’s not like they were perfectly fine with the system as long as it didn’t affect them, being one of the “famous” companies out there, while independent developers and small start-ups had to deal with this for years and years.
What about Netflix, GitHub and all of other companies who are able to get away. They are apparently big enough that Apple cares about them to bend the rules; why aren't we annoyed that they're not willing to stand up for other developers as well? They certainly should have some way of pressuring Apple.
> It’s funny how we hate here AMP and other technologies that are killing the open web, but we’re fine with a closed email system that locks you in Basecamp’s walled garden.
How is Hey "a closed email system"? It sends and receives emails using SMTP. Closed source email clients is far from a new invention and
The client doesn't use SMTP, you send your email to their server, probably using a json payload. They then send it for you over SMTP. Since the client doesn't use SMTP or POP/IMAP, you can't use Hey with a traditional email program, you must use their client.
I think that’s the whole point though. SMTP/POP/IMAP are pretty bad protocols, especially for mobile. Also they imply that the email client/server have to work in certain ways but hey! Want it to work in different ways
I mean, they give you MBOX export and forwarding forever even if you stop paying them. What else would you want them to do? The feature stack would be impossible to implement on IMAP, and all of the features would have to be exposed in every client anyway. They are trying to change the paradigm for people who hate how email works today, and I don't think that'd work if they said "Okay, first, add this new address to Mail on your iPhone. Cool. Now if you go on our website you'll get a great email experience."
(With that being said, there's no reason they couldn't publish an API so someone else could write a client...)
Last year in front of Congress (while actively developing this new product). They never mentioned it despite Basecamp being in the app store for years and paying Apple $0.
The "oh my this is shocking and unfair" act is all a ruse. They've been well aware of this since the onset, they even copied Netflix's app text so they can feign "see we're just like them!" despite knowing they're not.
Last week, effectively every iOS developer would have looked at their implementation and predicted App Store approval. It’s important to understand that because if you just read Apple’s rejection letter (you’ve read it as you repeated a talking point from it), you might think Apple was just clarifying a rule familiar to app developers.
There are a lot of rules lawyers in threads about Hey trying to figure out "tricks" that Basecamp or others could use to avoid the rule. That is not how this works. Apple is not a court, which (usually) plays by well stated rules, and cannot remake those rules at its discretion.
No, if you find a "trick" to get around Apple's rules[0], what happens is that you get blocked when they catch you. They might update the rules to explicitly ban what you did, but they'll gladly ban you first and change the rules later.
That's if you're little. If you're big (Google, Facebook, Uber), you might get a call from Tim Cook warning you that you need to stop what you're doing or you'll have trouble soon. Or perhaps they'll ban your cafeteria app, while leaving your consumer apps in the marketplace. Maybe you'll even get to negotiate, if you have enough leverage. But what won't happen is that Tim Cook will say "Looks like the rules don't cover this situation. Awwww, shucks!"
[0] There are some rules they don't care about (like marketing using push notifications), and enforcement of rules can be mixed. This is for the rules they care about.
Hey are trying to market an app on the app store as a 'free' app. Not offering sign up also means they don't have to add the 'offers in app purchases'.
So they're advertising the app as free. Even though its $99 a year.
Apples 30% cut is obscene and should be less. But Hey are using a 'free' label to market their app.
I am not really invested in either party but this comment is plainly wrong. They aren’t using the free label to market their service any more than Netflix, Tesla or any of the other apps in OPs link
the app is free. it's not a hey account, it's an app that lets you access your hey account from an iphone. the account itself has no dependence on the app.
Right. Enlightenment can come from imagining the app and the service as separate companies, i.e. the app being some third-party client for the service. The app, in such a case, clearly does not cost money. It's free. It just doesn't do much if you don't have the service; just like pet toys don't do much if you don't have a pet.
You're catching some flak here, but I think it's a fair point. It says "free", but all you get for free is... an icon on your home page and a login screen.
Apple could solve this by allowing a "Free, account required" descriptor/category for Netflix/Dropbox/etc/etc.
So "Free" is a lie, but one many other apps have used beforehand.
I think Apple solved this issue years ago because they got flack about "Free" apps that would have in-app purchases. Apps are not marked "Free" in the App Store. Instead it simply says "Get" to download the app.
They could add a "requires account" tag like they have "in-app purchases" but I don't think that would satisfy what Apple is looking for here (money).
It’s worth noting that courts and legal systems generally don’t work like that either. There are some examples of weird loopholes due to some specific wording of a law and things like that, but in general you can’t just get the best of the legal system because you “technically” did such and such. For example, you can’t scam someone by having a contract with extremely small print that they technically signed.
My favorite example of this was the attempt, by the Hunt Brothers, to "corner" the silver market in 1979/1980:
"But on January 7, 1980, in response to the Hunts' accumulation, the exchange rules regarding leverage were changed, when COMEX adopted "Silver Rule 7" placing heavy restrictions on the purchase of commodities on margin. The Hunt brothers had borrowed heavily to finance their purchases, and, as the price began to fall again, dropping over 50% in just four days, they were unable to meet their obligations, causing panic in the markets."
I think there needs to be some distinction between apps that are the main product (or close to it) and apps that support another product (like there is npo point to having the app by itself, you should already have gotten the product/account before downloading the app). I don't know too much about Apple's rules to know if they use that criteria, but it makes sense to me.
An app to manage your Tesla makes no sense unless you own a Tesla. You probably (definitely?) created an account when you ordered your car, so you don't need to sign-up in app. I suppose people that could buy a used Tesla without a Tesla account, but I'm pretty sure you need to link the used car to a new account before you can manage it through the app with the new account, so it still doesn't make sense to offer in-app signup. I see no issue with the Tesla app being approved.
Some of the other apps do seem to be legitimate complaints. Netflix being an obvious one- it's totally plausible for someone to expect to download Netflix on their iPad and then pay through Apple. Netflix could easily offer that but doesn't (probably because of the 30% cut). Apple would gladly reject a smaller app, but they approve Netflix because too many users would complain if they couldn't get Netflix on their iPad.
Edit: one other thing I haven't seen whether Basecamp could just charge $141.43 per year if someone pays through Apple, so Basecamp would get $99 per year after Apple takes their 30% cut. They are allowed to offer outside subscriptions for multiplatform products, as long as those subscriptions are also available in-app. That seems like it would follow Apple's rules. People that don't care about money could sign up in-app, but most people will sign up outside the app.
Tesla is definitely one of the easier cases to think about, the rest are in a grey area.
But even with Tesla it's not 100% crystal clear. There might be some buyers who pick Tesla specifically because of the fancy tech features like Summon mode. It's impossible to use Summon mode without the app. So for one of those buyers, the app is an essential part of the purchase, just like HEY subscribers who expect to read emails on their phone.
I don't think every app comes with a clear label attached, but I think most people could decide which apps are the product and which apps are just a feature for the product. For argument's sake, I'll claim the core distinction to be if the only realistic alternative to use a product is through an app on another platform or through a web browser, then the app is the core product and not just a supporting feature. The product can live on servers, but if it weren't for the app then the servers wouldn't matter.
I can still drive a Tesla without the app. It's clear that the core product is car, not the app. Some people may have bought it because of a defining feature, but you are not paying $80k for Summon mode. You are paying $80k for a car that has Summon mode.
Wells Fargo offers almost all of their functionality through physical branches and ATMs. Having an app is just a feature, a bank account is clearly not an app.
I cannot use Netflix without an app or browser on my TV, phone, tablet, or computer. There are movies stored on servers, but I'm not paying $15/month unless I can watch movies. That means Netflix's core product is an app and per Apple's rules they should offer in-app purchases.
WeWork is a little harder for me. They are a real estate company but I'm not sure you could call WeWork and get a workspace over the phone nor could you do it in person (you can call a landlord directly, but that is not WeWork's product). I think their core product is that you can book a space online or with an app. I think they need to have in-app signup and purchases.
Github is the most gray one for me- once setup, I use it mostly through the command line. I could claim that the core product is not an app, but I don't honestly believe that. I use a significant part of GitHub's feature set through the browser (discovering repositories, clicking through links to read about a package before cloning it).
I just don’t think the distinction is actually as clear as you describe it. Most of these apps are clients for a server-based product that you’re paying for. One could argue that the Netflix app isn’t the product, it’s just a video player that you use to connect to the server that you’re paying to have access to. If Netflix just exposed .mp4 links in a web browser, then it would work fine in Safari on an iPhone.
Or imagine a cloud-based e-book service that you can just SSH into. Should Apple allow apps marketed simply as SSH clients, but not allow an SSH client branded with that e-book service?
I addressed this. It's not a watertight mathematically provable law, but I think that with the majority of apps, a reasonable person making a good faith effort would have the same conclusion as me. I said if it's the only realistic alternative is to use an app or browser. I also said that the product might "live" on a server, but if you can only access it via app or browser then the product is an app.
Most of these products are not clients. A client is something like an RSS reader, where one company makes app but interact with services/products from other companies. Netflix does not sell you a subscription to watch movies and then allow you to watch it with third-party apps. They do not expose .mp4 files, so saying "if they did this" isn't relevant. They try their hardest to force you to watch with their app.
Overall, your arguments are silly. People have common sense and can use it. Using misdirection in your words doesn't change what the functionality of the product is. Coming up with strange corner cases that don't exist and aren't viable products aren't good examples. Until an actual commercial e-book service that functions through SSH exists then Apple doesn't need to waste their time addressing it.
I'm not disputing the fact that, barring some controversial edge cases, most people could probably agree on the classification. My point is that Apple clearly appears to be claiming that there are some very clear rules that are followed strictly without any personal judgement about any particular app or company. A lot of their PR about this stuff has been of the form "we're not making any judgments about you, we're just following the rules" (never mind that it's their rules in the first place).
But I think that's pretty clearly not the case, and moreover, I think people might be just as upset if Apple's policies said "we just use our common sense to classify apps and determine which features they can use on our platform" and then appeared to apply those determinations inconsistently.
The Tesla example is unfortunate to support he point because Apple doesn’t charge 30% on physical goods.
A funny idea, maybe some apps should sell a physical card, or wearable that gives you access to premium features, but it would be ecological.
Depending on what you were selling it would be forbidden under either 3.1.1 In-App Purchase or 3.1.4 Hardware-Specific Content:
> Apps may not use their own mechanisms to unlock content or functionality, such as license keys, augmented reality markers, QR codes, etc.
> In limited circumstances, such as when features are dependent upon specific hardware to function, the app may unlock that functionality without using in-app purchase[...] You may not, however, require users to purchase unrelated products or engage in advertising or marketing activities to unlock app functionality.
I believe you can upgrade your tesla capabilities from the tesla app, say enable autopilot for $7000 or the model 3 performance upgrade for I believe $2000 (?).
>one other thing I haven't seen whether Basecamp could just charge $141.43 per year if someone pays through Apple, so Basecamp would get $99 per year after Apple takes their 30% cut.
They could.
>People that don't care about money could sign up in-app, but most people will sign up outside the app.
The problem is that the iOS app cannot in any way or form mention that a) you can pay for the subscription outside the application b) the price of the subscription outside of the application is different than inside the application.
> The problem is that the iOS app cannot in any way or form mention that a) you can pay for the subscription outside the application b) the price of the subscription outside of the application is different than inside the application.
Thanks. Having to hide the difference from customers is worth the fight IMHO.
> Edit: one other thing I haven't seen whether Basecamp could just charge $141.43 per year if someone pays through Apple, so Basecamp would get $99 per year after Apple takes their 30% cut. They are allowed to offer outside subscriptions for multiplatform products, as long as those subscriptions are also available in-app. That seems like it would follow Apple's rules. People that don't care about money could sign up in-app, but most people will sign up outside the app.
There's been couple of times when I've eaten the markup that comes with paying through Apple simply because that means that I can go into my iTunes subscriptions page, hit the "stop" button on it, and it's done. No buried unsubscribe links, no "tell us why you're leaving" quiz, no disputing charges on my card. It's done and over and I don't ever have to think about it again.
If third-party payment services become the norm on the App Store, I expect a steep decline in quality of unsubscribe experiences across the board.
> one other thing I haven't seen whether Basecamp could just charge $141.43 per year if someone pays through Apple, so Basecamp would get $99 per year after Apple takes their 30% cut.
This is far from ideal for two reasons:
1) Some users will be paying 30% more just because they signed up in the app. How is this a good experience that protects the user?
2) most importantly, Basecamp loses the ability to manage the financial aspects of the customer relationship. They’re unable to give discounts, credit, refunds, add time to the subscription etc. It’s a hassle for all the back office management as now some customers come through a completely different billing + subscription platform.
> 2) most importantly, Basecamp loses the ability to manage the financial aspects of the customer relationship. They’re unable to give discounts, credit, refunds, add time to the subscription etc. It’s a hassle for all the back office management as now some customers come through a completely different billing + subscription platform.
I want to start by saying I think Apple is overstepping their bounds here and has been for years. But one reason I like the app store is because companies are generally terrible stewards. For example, I took my car to the dealer and the next week I get post cards for XM Radio (I will continue to get them for months because this has happened before). A few years ago I had a reoccurring donation to a popular Public Radio show. I was changing credit cards and was trying to update the subscription. There was no way to update it on their website or contact them to update (which included canceling). I sent email with no response. I ended up cancelling the card and with it my subscription. I'm now very skeptical about services that manage reoccurring payments.
One of the problems is that as a consumer, I like the features Apple implements with this.
I can just use Apple Pay instead of handing over my credit card. Don't want a subscription? No complicated process. No need to call a number. No need to email anyone. I just click to cancel and I am done.
As lousy as this is, the consumer experience is dramatically improved.
I do too. But, a better middle-ground needs to be found which services both consumers and developers. It could literally be as simple as something closer to a 90/10 split.
Why though? Apple is well-aware of their worth in your sales funnel and know that customer acquisition outside of their store/devices is a lot more expensive.
Nobody would be complaining if you Apple's user-base wasn't so juicy that your best option is forking over 30%. If it was easy to acquire customers outside the store it wouldn't even be an issue.
Forking over 30% isn't the best option. It's the only option.
If Apple had unlisted apps that didn't show up in the store listings and required a click through from your website to get to the app's store page, I bet some developers would opt for that if it meant they didn't have to pay the 30% tax.
Right, but the value isn't that you're listed in the app store, the value is that you can collect payment on-device. The store isn't the retail space, the whole device it.
You could not release an app in their store and ignore their existence entirely. But that's ridiculous and you can't afford to do that because their user-base is so valuable. And so Apple charges a premium because they know that.
You've repeated this argument several times and you're starting to sound like an Apple shill.
The idea that the App Store (with 2M+ apps) is a meaningful source of customer acquisition is utter horseshit. In fact it's now the opposite since Apple will sometimes place ads for competitor apps ahead of your own in search results.
I only repeat the argument so I get to hear a bunch of people’s takes on it. Once you’re deep in a thread it’s pretty much only you and the person you’re replying to.
I don’t think the App Store is the source of customer acquisition. I think being able to sell on iOS devices is the source of customer acquisition. Being able to upsell a user to your premium service right there on the device is the valuable thing that costs a premium.
This is a really ambiguous, unusual, and (in my opinion) inappropriate use of the term "customer acquisition".
The App Store is a marketplace that connects people developing for a platform (iOS) to customers using devices compatible with that platform. It is also the only marketplace that does this. In this way, it is best thought of as a (monopolistic) distribution channel.
But why is the “App Store” the distribution channel and not the device itself? I mean Apple would be within their right to just not allow 3rd party apps at all on their devices so why is it weird that they take a cut from anyone who wants to set up a booth on their land?
Like it feels wrong to punish a company for not closing their platform like consoles do to any only working with a few select partners.
This is the second time in less than a day that you've broken HN's guideline against accusations of shillage, astroturfing, etc. It says this:
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That rule is in place for good reason: the overwhelming majority of such accusations are pure imagination, which makes them poison. It's also a cheap, aggressive internet tactic, which makes it ubiquitous. Cheap ubiquitous poison is an environmental hazard, especially on a site which is trying to deviate from internet default, so it needs to be regulated. This rule is how we do that here. There is plenty of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for anyone who wants it.
Paying 10% of your revenue for them to usurp your customer relationship seems like a bad deal to me.
For developers I think a possible strategy would be to sell two products; standard edition and iOS optimized. Charge +30% for the iOS version since Apple users are (supposedly) willing to pay more.
Charging iPhone users more was actually one of the suggestions Phil Schiller made. I'm pretty sure Spotify charges more for people who subscribe from within the iPhone app. They made a lot of noise a year or two ago about this and ended up with this approach.
Personally, I'm very skeptical of subscription options since many companies are bad actors; making it difficult to cancel or throwing adds and promotions at you.
A lot has to do with how it is framed. I think Apple would have less pushback if they charged 50% and told developers, we're providing the devices, the user base, the app store, the promotion, the dev tools, the payment processing, you're providing the app. We each need each other so let's split revenue 50/50. Seems it would be tougher to argue that, than 70/30 which is an arbitrary declaration.
Unfortunately Apple's intention is that you would not hear about an alternative way to pay for the subscription and that the alternative way is cheaper.
I mean if you partnered with Target to sell your shampoo I think they would be rightfully pissed if the bottles you sent them to put down said something like "Buy it on our website instead for 30% cheaper!"
I imagine that if a consumer sees a product at Target, they have an idea that the product might be cheaper somewhere else. However, do consumers have an idea that if they seen an in-app purchase that the exact same thing might actually be on sale somewhere else and that it has a different price?
If the app says that "One year HEY subscription" is $142 and the app is from HEY itself, what reason is there to believe that it's not just the plain old price of HEY?
Probably could be a lot less than $43/mo if Basecamp didn't feel the need to spend 7 figures on a domain.
They're not filling some massive need; it's yet another email service. If they can't justify it at $142 a year how do they justify it at $99 a year? You reap what you sow.
I think this point is worth highlighting. Although I'm not at all on Apple's side here, they are offering something of value. What galls is that they're demanding 15-30% of all revenue for it. Payment processing simply isn't that costly, and I doubt the app store is that expensive either.
They're not charging for the payment processing though. They're charging a premium because you're using their platform/store as part of your sales funnel. They know that being able to sell your stuff on iOS devices is worth a lot of money and that you'll make more money after the 30% cut than if you didn't sell in the store at all.
Apple knows that customer acquisition is extremely expensive outside the store and is charging accordingly.
I disagree about the value of the ecosystem but that's just personal taste. From an economic perspective, Apple is raking in cash and it only investing part of it back into feature development. They're 30% in-app purchase rent could just be 15 or 20% and they'd still be able to easily fund their UX teams. They're not charging what they need to operate, they're charging as much as the market can bare. And the market can bear a lot because users allow it.
Any company that wants to stay competitive. The entire point of this post is that iOS app makers are deliberately hurting their customer experience because their monopolist platform is charging unreasonable fees.
Unreasonable compared to what? Physical store markup? Other digital marketplaces like Google Play, Kindle? Spotify? Steam? If App makers in general are hurting and they are all paying the same 30% cut, wouldn’t the market have 43% markup?
You also act as if money on the store is coming from small Indy developers and not big corporations and mostly play to win games. Especially since the former big money makers have stopped allowing in app subscriptions.
> As lousy as this is, the consumer experience is dramatically improved.
I also am a (generally) happy iPhone user. That being said, I don't think this is a strong argument in support of Apple's monopoly on the App Store.
Make it the default so that non-techy users have no difficulties, but other methods for loading/installing apps should be allowed. If Apple's experience truly is that much better for the consumer, then let it win on its merits.
Except that the developer gets 30% less money. I mean come on, it's effectively a commission on the transaction, and I think that such an high commission on the transaction would be illegal in most countries. But Apple is not a bank and can probably get around this (but isn't effecitvely acting like a bank in this situation? I wish that the EU investigates this behaviour)
Basecamp/Hey seems to have hit upon a combination of use case, pricing, and closedness that Apple doesn’t like. Email, $99/year, no POP/IMAP? Not allowed. But there’s no policy on paper about it.
558 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 362 ms ] threadI suppose a large share of the potential Hey customers work in tech and might have a better understanding of what the app store tax actually means. And the EU anti trust investigations probably play role too?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson
Remember Hey isn't free. People on waiting list already knew this from day one. With 70K invite, that is $7M annual revenue already.
DHH also went on about making sure no mention of Sign up in Webpages as well as many other commonly known App Stores rules before the App was submitted. And many thought it would pass, and it did for 1.0. It is the bug fix 1.01 update that was blocked Due to IAP reason. For most if not all iOS developers. This is new. So new that Fastmail didn't get their treatment until now. [1]
This new IAP rule force 30% on new sign up, as you could not even allow the App to be on App Store without IAP ( hence this website ). Along with the threat from Apple about pulling Hey from App Store, and finally their tone, which was like adding even more fuel to outrage, and I quote
Thank you for being an iOS app developer. We understand that Basecamp has developed a number of apps and many subsequent versions for the App Store for many years, and that the App Store has distributed millions of these apps to iOS users. These apps do not offer in-app purchase — and, consequently, have not contributed any revenue to the App Store over the last eight years.
Is not exactly helping and got even more outrage from developers who dont even use Hey. To me that is about the most polite way from Apple saying fuck you. ( If the webpage author is reading this I suggest you include this quote on the webpage, or make a new site with all the popular useful free Apps that helped users but contributed noting to Apple. )
I know there are many who hate DHH and Ruby Rails, but seriously I cant see how he could have orchestra the whole thing as marketing. As if he knew about the IAP rule changes before hand.
[1]https://twitter.com/Fastmail/status/1273800222989324288
There are regularly stories about iOS apps getting removed for odd reasons on the HN tops, but the Hey story blew up pretty quickly.
> I know there are many who hate DHH and Ruby Rails
I also I also heard that a lot of people hate DHH and his Twitter comment bubble doesn't seem to like HN. Either way, he is certainly not wrong about the issue. I also don't see how Hey would profit from marketing around that. First of all, Hey is pretty expensive and has a pretty narrow target audience as of now. Most people are perfectly happy with their free mail, people who aren't are probably already aware that those alternatives exist. Even more importantly, I don't see how they are going to profit by putting their App Store listing at risk. I doubt an E-Mail service is able so succeed if it doesn't offer native applications or at least a integration with third party clients. Since they chose to not support IMAP etc, Hey's iOS app is integral to the buisness. No app in the store, no profit.
I tend to think Spotify is too big for the media and other pundits to consider to be the little guy.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/18/phil-schiller-apple-hey...
[2] https://daringfireball.net/2020/06/hey_app_store_rejection_f...
However, even if apps/companies have sign up in the app I still use the web browser to sign up. I like the security of the browser more for personal info and set up than an app full of unnecessary permissions.
I personally truly do not mind, and even prefer, opening up a browser to sign up. Overall for liability reasons it might even be better to just have one endpoint for signing up, the web.
Force everyone to do it or no-one, don't pick the WORST POSSIBLE APP to deny. @dhh isn't one of the people Apple really wants to get on the bad side of (See Apple Card debacle).
What if I own an iPhone and HEY is what I want on my phone? How can I override Apple's decision? If I can't, who really owns this device?
I know you're not, but - anyone earnestly asking this question hasn't been paying attention to Apple since, well, ever.
Also nowadays it would be useful to have some sort of debug port, for example a serial port to connect and have a CLI to do diagnostic, upload a new firmware, etc. They have these interfaces in the TVs but most of the time are either disabled or protected so the end user cannot use them.
See dishwashers, microwaves, Apple iPhones, and washing machines. Car manufacturers still publish schematics for their circuitry (for a fee)
Nowadays a brand new high end +2000€ Samsung TV comes with ads (!) in the menu and the apps feel like they'd be running on a potato. With that kind of Smart TVs, the hardware won't be the issue since it'll be the software that will be obsole way before the hardware. Smart TV is not a promise, its a thread.
It is a pretty well established model. I don't like it sometimes either, but you know what you are getting when you buy an iPhone. It isn't like they changed policy after you bought the device.
It technically fulfills the requirements specified in the review guidelines but I suspect it would be frowned upon.
Hint, if it is expected, that doesn't mean it's still ok..
They could be continuing to make the (justified and correct!) stink about Apple's terrible practices, while also having their app on the store (or forcing Apple to further highlight how arbitrarily-applied their standards are). Win-win.
The problem with a hypocritical stance is that its existence defies logic to begin with.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/8/8913105/spotify-apple-app-...
That said, I think Apple forbids you trying to redirect people out of the app by explaining that they take a cut if you sign up in it.
> You must not directly or indirectly target iOS users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase, and your general communications about other purchasing methods must not discourage use of in-app purchase.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#mul...
> $99/year email service, of which Apple is rent-seeking $30
I'm wholly on Hey's side here, but I think this is a misleading way of putting it. Apple only wants 30% of in-app purchases, not purchases made outside of the app. The contention is that Hey thinks they shouldn't be required to accept in-app purchases, which given that either Hey or the user pays Apple an expensive tax on those purchases, makes sense to me.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/07/apple-app-store-had-estimate...
How should Apple go about making money from the App Store? Paid apps are dwindling off. They do charge a flat fee per developer, but it can’t be too large or they’ll lose all the indie developers, and there just aren’t enough developers overall to make that a viable business on its own. They could charge a flat fee to the developer per app download -- something really small, a few cents per download -- but then what about free apps?
What they want is to take a share of the profits from developers who are making money on their platform, while also supporting free apps free of charge. The 30% fee is their attempt to do that. The problem is that it’s easy to game the system and just run your payments outside their store. Hence all the silly rules to try to prevent that.
Maybe 30% is just too much. Would people complain as much if it were 10%, or 5%?
Or maybe they should just give up on App Store revenue and focus on hardware sales. But it would be a little weird for them not to have a direct incentive to improve the store experience for users.
Or Apple could drop the charade and charge users for access to apps based on whatever pricing scheme they want.
The promotions one is interesting; I think it has the same pitfall as AdWords: if my app / web page is the best result for the user for a given search, why should I have to pay money to promote it? If Apple or Google is doing their job right, taking money for promotions is actively detrimental to users. Not that that stops AdWords, of course.
Charging the users would make sense. It’s a shame that we’ve all been trained to expect this stuff to be free.
I guess subscription-based stores are a decent approach? Like Apple Arcade. But that has downsides for users too -- you potentially end up paying multiple subscriptions (like most people do now for streaming TV) so it adds barriers to entry for new (possibly better) stores. Who wants to pay for yet another subscription service?
It's less risky to develop some skinner box slot machine because you aren't out much investment if it gets rejected. Plus, the digital goods are pulled from thin air, so anything you sell is pure profit.
Contrast that with a real app that provides a valuable service with backend costs and a subscription fee. There's a lot more investment to build an app like that, so getting rejected is a huge risk and, even at 15%, Apple's cut might be a big chunk of your margin.
Since Apple incentivizes low effort slot machines and detriments high quality apps, I feel like there's been an increasing portion of the app store is turning into what I consider garbage apps.
The subscription cut also creates the opposite scenario of what everyone is always parroting about iOS customers being profitable. They might spend more money, but they're definitely not more profitable (per customer) if you're paying 15% to a middleman.
I'm confused why they don't rip the bandaid off and just charge everyone at the same time though. Charging Tesla 30% probably isn't feasible but this seems like an ideal time to introduce fees for all companies that are currently allowed exemptions (Netflix, Lyft, Airbnb, Uber, Audible, Airlines etc). Yes they could put up a fight but at least some of them would cave.
Until the government gets involved, they are totally allowed to selectively and arbitrarily enforce the rules. Banning Hey but not Netflix just makes them look like hypocrites and makes them less money. Seems like the worst of both worlds.
Since cars are physical goods, Tesla COULD freely sell the car in the app using Apple Pay, Credit Card, etc in the app if they wanted, just like Amazon, Walmart and other e-commerce apps do. They wouldn't pay the 30%, just the credit card fee.
Similarly, Lyft, Airbnb, Uber and some Airlines accept ApplePay, Credit Card, etc, all without the 30%, because it's a physical service, not software or a digital product.
Netflix and Audible just don't sell their stuff on the app. It's not an exemption, it's something predicted in the App Store terms: don't link to the signup/sales page. The problem here is that Hey is claiming that they should be allowed to use that rule that Netflix and Audible use.
I tried to limit the list to apps where you couldn't get to _any_ functionality without logging in. AirBnB lets you browse around etc. Airlines let you look at dates / availability.
I included Wells Fargo, however, because I thought it was wild that they're able to provide straight web links to Safari to sign up for banking services, whereas Hey has to pretend like accounts are bestowed via divine intervention.
Why, then, did Apple decide to gerrymander its rules to extract rent from one industry and not the other?
Perhaps there's an ethical or philosophical argument why Apple feels entitled to one industry's revenue and not the other, but I haven't heard that argument.
Did you know you can't ship a custom browser engine on iOS? Yup, another one of the rules. See why?
https://caniuse.com/#feat=push-api
I tried to look it up, I saw 13 years but that sounded like too long.
At this point this is no private dark pool, but a public market place, the transactions on which affect an unfathomable number of consumers, and Apple should and must be subject to the level of government regulation and oversight that governs other public market places like the NYSE and the CME. I suspect that this will come sooner or later, or otherwise these markets will be broken up entirely, but behavior like this from Apple only hastens this outcome.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/236550/percentage-of-us-...
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/3/21206400/apple-tax-amazon-...
> Apple should and must be subject to the level of government regulation and oversight that governs other public market places like the NYSE and the CME.
First it's Facebook should be treated as a Public-as-in-Government Square, and now the App Store should be governed like the stock market?
I think Apple's morally in the wrong here. But the solution isn't just going to be just pulling some lofty regulation out of thin air and trying to re-apply it.
That's exactly what the solution will be. Apple will eventually be responsible for ushering in regulation that kills software distribution monopolies like the App Store. It'll be an interesting new landscape to be in for a lot of markets.
Relevant quote from investigation announcement: "The investigations concern in particular the mandatory use of Apple's own proprietary in-app purchase system and restrictions on the ability of developers to inform iPhone and iPad users of alternative cheaper purchasing possibilities outside of apps."
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_...
They also doesn't support free VP9 video coded because they are part of competitive FFMPEG.
I didn't like Apple due to this gatekeeper/walled garden but I started to hate it more after watching "Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine" documentary. Such a big company and still they did illegal option backdating, avoiding tax in Ireland, etc.
It needs more time for people to realize their mistake of supporting this company.
Do you want a successful business? Ok, then follow the rules, cover your ass, and do what you need to do to get your business going, even if it’s not always the ideal situation for you.
But no, I guess lashing out explosively and torpedoing everything because you’re not treated like the big players when you’re still a little guy is more satisfying, if less profitable.
It'd help if there were consistent rules that were equally enforced.
It's precisely because everyone's so deeply cynical and feeling so powerless, that these rent seeking practices continue to flourish.
The way out is not to try and carve out a little niche for yourself and hope they don't come for you next. You can if you're a selfish coward but know that people don't respect selfish cowards and unless you want to live alone or with a few other cowards who agree to cling to each other for miserly comfort, it is a losing strategy.
The way out is also not to cause anarchy because 'everything is fucked anyway'.
This PR tsunami is actually one of the best weapons against monopolies, because they signal to policy makers that they can make a career out of working for a cause that the public deeply cares about. The big corps know this and try to avoid PR problems but it seems like Apple has gotten real bold as of late and I look forward to seeing what comes of this.
2) This site is not built by the people who built Hey.
3) The rules are being asymmetrically applied. Why should people be OK with Apple bullying all the companies they think they can get away with bullying?
Not to pick on your bio too much, but I'm wondering if you may be having difficulty understanding the situation as a self described "ethically challenged software engineer working for a major tech company". But, you'll never get a new business off the ground successfully if you "follow the rules, cover your ass, ..." because the incumbents you are competing with are already doing that.
As I've ranted about before, running a startup is about taking calculated risks. You need to fight these fights if you think they have a high positive expected value. As sibling commentators explained, you do not always do this for altruistic reasons -- picking fights with a Goliath when you're a David is easy free PR for you.
Now granted, this kind of easy, free PR might be a drop in the bucket if you're a BigCo. And on the other hand, the expected risk might be high enough that the tradeoff really doesn't work out in your favor in that situation! But that is because the strategy for handling this kind of a setback is really not fungible from running a startup to running a BigCo.
Google scrapes info and displays it in widgets above links to the actual content. Google charges trademark holders AdWords ransom to protect searches for their own brands.
Amazon kills OSS business models by offering managed OSS services on AWS at an unbeatable cost. Amazon picks off the best performing market place categories with Amazon Basics ‘recommended’ competitors.
The list goes on and on.
Tech is an industry defined on building scale and then collecting rents. Apple IAP is just the current outrage but the entire industry is working towards building the next ‘platform’ for others to sharecrop on.
That said, the comment is a simple terse statement of "facts".
Doesn't Apple have its own version of this in the App Store?
I don't get the objection to this one. Isn't the point of open source to let the best vendor win?
Too many companies fail to realize that you must relentlessly wage war on cost to survive.
If authors want credit and money, the license needs to state as much. You can't publish something saying "do whatever you want" and then complain that people aren't being fair to you.
Well… you can complain. You just can't sue them. But the complaint would still be valid.
You can act like a jerk and follow all the laws at the same time, it's just that the consequences for you won't be identical.
I am sure some people don't steal/murder because of laws, but I optimistically think the majority don't because they don't wish to hurt others.
The licenses weren't conceived of with the thought of something like AWS. Now that we're in the midst of things that's changing but what is an officially supported open source license [0] is too slow so you can't use the OSS label if you've you're not using the approved licenses. Both Mongo and Elasticsearch have changed their licenses to prevent cloud players from taking advantage of their work and companies like Gitlab make a clear distinction between their FOSS parts and what they make money on by using two different licenses. The issues are only a little over a half decade old now the OSS players are starting to figure it out.
Open source just doesn't mean anyone can use it, there's a definition to adhere to and and org managing that definition. [1]
It was never intended as a free for all.
[0] https://opensource.org/licenses [1] https://opensource.org/about
You mean...a hosting company? I find it hard to believe that the open source movement was blindsided by the realization that there are companies that sell hosting services and that somehow this destroys the viability of their movement.
There is an expectation of contribution back.
The issues are only a little over a half decade old now the OSS players are starting to figure it out.
Open source just doesn't mean anyone can use it, there's a definition to adhere to and and org managing that definition. [1]
It was never intended as a free for all.
[0] https://opensource.org/licenses [1] https://opensource.org/about
* You have people that are ideologically driven (FSF)
* You have companies that Open Source as a weapon [0] (Chromium)
* You have projects that are very pragmatic. They believe it is the path to technical excellence.
* You have individuals do it for their resume
* You have individuals that do it just for fun :)
[0] https://www.gwern.net/Complement#open-source-as-a-strategic-...
This is already happening. A lot of projects that are nominally open source are more and more influenced by the decisions of particular companies which erodes its purpose.
I might be ignorant here, but isn’t it the “open source companies” that are actively doing this, rather than Amazon? It seems to me that these companies that represent an open source project are realizing that you don’t get it both ways: it turns out that releasing open source software means that the source code is open, which means that you don’t get automatic business just because the name of your company is the same as the name of the open source project.
All the problems from app store racket still applies such as the tax. And I am not saying android doesn't need a lot of those changes, it's just they break things without helping. There are many examples if you look around.
1. Disguised ads in search results (they have been making ads less obvious) - https://i.postimg.cc/h4V8TbqF/Screenshot-20200620-041823-Goo...
Even if you search the exact name, it will bombard you with whoever is paying the most.
2. Google closed source their play billing library recently. Apps which use the library can't be put on fdroid.
3. At Google I/O 2018, Google introduced an alternative app distribution format called the Android App Bundle with the file extension .aab. This format requires giving a copy of your app’s signing key to Google. AABs are harder for users to manually sideload as they aren’t natively supported by Android’s package installer and must be unpacked and devs have to do more work to distribute on other platforms.
4. Google killing Termux with Android 10 and many others relying on the functionality by removing the perms to execute binaries.
5. Fdroid can't auto update because of restrictions by google.
6. Broke custom recoveries such as TWRP.
7. Irresponsible automated ban of anything covid. Surprisingly this doesn't or never affect popular apps. Must be because they whitelist them.
2] https://www.xda-developers.com/f-droid-android-apps-google-p...
3] https://www.xda-developers.com/google-play-billing-v3-app-bu...
4] https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/wiki/Termux-and-An...
6] https://www.xda-developers.com/twrp-lead-explains-android-10...
7] https://9to5google.com/2020/05/19/podcast-addict-banned/
Microsoft hardware with Android, a decent update lifecycle, MS365, alternate store, MS billing APIs, etc. would make a compelling offering IMO. The only thing I think MS would screw up would be sideloading. They seem to be all in on the current code signing / trust system and it's absolute trash.
There are so many industries that have been turned into complete garbage by rent seekers that I feel like anything that doesn't absolutely screw developers and customers would be super successful. The problem is that we only have about 5 tech companies on the planet that are big enough to compete.
App bundle is a way to reduce hassle of uploading multiple apks for cutting down apk size on different targets. Developers can and always have to build regular apks for other distribution platforms or for users to sideload. I don't see how AAB makes devs do more work.
Yes, all the major tech companies are engaged in rent seeking. But Apple is the only one that says users must either must pay rent or throw away their hardware.
The App Store and its policies are not the problem. The App Store is Apple's store, just like Amazon.com is Amazon's store. But the App Store shouldn't be the only way to get software on my phone. And no, reinstalling apps from a computer every seven days doesn't count.
(The semi-exceptions are game consoles. I don't like that either, but since they're single-purpose devices I find it much less bad.)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.epicgames....
https://www.polygon.com/2020/4/21/21229930/fortnite-availabl...
The only value added by Apple is some kind of vetting (they don’t do code review, they just check that the app meets their recommendations... and they are called RECOMMENDATIONS not REQUIEMENTS).
My app was recently rejected because i refused to sell in-app purchases and want to keep purchases only on my website.
Why should Apple care what software makers want?
I get that it's a pain to develop software for the iPhone and then have to pay rent to Apple to get it to users; but that's not Apple's problem unless enough users either complain or switch hardware to cut into Apple's revenue. That doesn't seem to be happening. Sure, there are plenty of users (I'm one of them) who refuse to buy an Apple device precisely because of limitations like this, but there are plenty more users who don't seem to care; whatever they are getting through Apple's curated app store appears to satisfy their needs. As long as that remains true, Apple has no incentive to change its policies, and that's just a business reality that any software developer contemplating making an app for the iPhone is going to have to deal with.
And you’re defending that?
Personally I think devs should just pass the 30% to consumers or withdraw their apps. That is how you get leverage.
The Mafia didn't build things. It just came in and took over things others had built.
Apple built its app store. It built the iPhone. It got its users fair and square, by providing a product that users want. If you think that's the same as the Mafia, you have a very skewed view of business.
They do no such thing. They just prevent other stores from providing apps for their own product. Which they are within their rights to do, since it's their product.
I'll bring it up again: game consoles. Steam. And no, they don't deserve a pass.
Why Steam? No one ever has to use Steam--you can install whatever you want on your PC. Steam isn't even installed by default in 99% of cases.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23579943
As for the why: I'm thinking from the point of view of a developer. For me it's all the same. Paying 30% to Apple is the same as paying 30% to Steam or x% to console makers. In practice it doesn't matter if the appliance the user runs my software is essential or not, or if the store is exclusive, or comes preinstalled or not. I'm still paying a percentage to someone.
Sucks in all cases.
I personally have platforms I simply will not use (or refuse to spend money on directly, like EA's Origin, where I only own/care about C&C) regardless how good of a deal it is.
Valve has the ability to set whatever rules they want within their store. A world where we didn't allow this would get very complicated very quickly. Do we also make Walmart and Target carry every brand? How much are they allowed to markup the price? Who decides?
If Steam provides such a valuable service that consumers aren't willing to shop anywhere else even when they can, then that's what it is.
And, I think that's what would largely happen on the iPhone anyway if side-loading was allowed, outside of extraordinary circumstances like when protesters can't access a critical safety app. But, in order to keep apps on their store, Apple would have to make a (slightly) greater effort to keep developers happy.
(I also think Steam zealots are ridiculous, but that is a separate discussion.)
The parameters have been clear for over a decade, and it’s really time to stop whining that the iPhone is not an open platform. Apple is the only iPhone app distribution channel and they make the rules. If you don’t want that, don’t buy an iPhone/don’t make iPhone apps. If you make iPhone apps, own it.
Instead of, you know, just accepting bad things because they've been bad for a decade. Slavery was around in the US for more than 100 years. Did that make it right? Maybe slave owners said similar things to Abolitionists, "but it's been this way for ages!!"
According to Apple, if your app is not a "reader" app it must allow subscribing in-app.
Can you imagine if Best Buy required Apple to add "Best Buy Payments" to MacOS so that Best Buy could collect a 30% fee on top of any services subscription that Apple sells to that MacBook user? All for the privilege of selling their products through the BB stores.
Apple isn't marking up a product for resale in it's retail environments. It is, in many cases, forcing its developers (who provide their valuable products to Apple for free, after paying Apple an annual fee) to completely rearrange their business models in order for Apple to collect a huge portion of their revenues, entirely on their terms.
As for your Best Buy example, Best Buy can make that demand, but Best Buy would lose more from not having Apple’s products than Apple would from not being placed on Best Buy’s shelves.
The second part there is what a lot of people seem to have difficulty accepting.
I’d be so impressed if one of you would just head over to Android and make a non-iPhone app that took the world by storm. Prove to us all that the 30% is a bad bargain, that Apple needs to change, that your software is valuable even without their store.
I guess it’s disheartening to see instead just another set of entitled complaints and dubious concern over end users, most of whom have no idea your $10 app exists and never thought about it when buying their $1000 phone.
But, it's also becoming more and more critical as phones take an increasingly central roll in our lives.
(Apple is in a frustratingly unique position compared to Walmart, Target, Best Buy, et. al., of course, in that the App Store is the way to get applications onto iPhones.)
Your Apple hardware is your Costco Membership Card. You aren’t able to buy Sam’s Club products using your Costco membership, and Costco’s under no expectation to make them available to you.
Your iPhone is not compatible with any software.
Some things are compatible and some things are not.
Edit: “Compatible” is not about the tech in this case (the binary would theoretically run) but about the terms of your agreement with the manufacturer.
If you buy a Costco fridge and with it a contract to only store Costco-sold food in it, then you have a better analogy. 80% of the world seems to prefer the AnyFood Fridge, and for some reason 20% buy the Costco with the agreement.
--
Edit response: How many people do you think read the agreement they signed with Apple? How many realize Apple is increasing the price of software by ~30%?
You don't need to muddy the waters by making a ridiculous analogy that somehow equates a computer to a membership card (of all things!).
The computer is a computer. Full stop. There is a store on the computer. There should be other stores on the computer but they're not allowed because the people that make the computer are partaking in anti-competitive, anti-consumer shenanigans.
It's interesting you'd say that because it's actually not true (I am not accusing you of lying at all - I take your statement at face value!)
What I mean is the following:
When I buy a phone - no matter the maker - I have deep within me a default assumption that if I want some app, some provider, some service, some feature, on my phone - that it will be, that it can be, and if someone thinks it up it'll be there shortly. I DO NOT assume that because Apple wants to steal people's work, some apps will never appear there.
Do you remember the early days of the app store and the saying "There's an app for that" (usually referring to things like fart generators and TV quotes).
Nowadays you'd NEVER think to say such a thing because Apple is ensuring it cannot be true - and more and more developers and platforms are choosing not to use it.
It's pretty plainly clear to me that Apple ONLY wants large, rich, well-known companies publishing apps; they grudgingly publish apps for small or individual developers, but really deep down wish they didn't have to.
Stuff like what we are seeing now with Hey is their endgame to finally get everyone except their exclusive club off the list.
I bought an iPhone and had no idea bit torrent clients were banned
If Apple had promised customers that Age of Empires runs on Macs, then they would have a hard time getting Microsoft to give them 30%. But Apple has made not such promise to consumers.
Besides, there’s an email client for the iPhone. If there wasn’t, consumers might complain. If Hey was the only game in town, I’m sure they’d be given a sweeter deal.
Given that Age of Empires has actually had Mac versions, I'm not sure this is the comparison you're looking for here. :)
The POINT that I'm making is that people their phone is theirs and they can install what they want on it. Even if that thing comes from the app store. EVEN NOW when I want to do something I go looking for an app. I don't assume my phone can't do it. And I certainly don't assume it can't do it thanks to shenanigans on Apple's part.
The reality however is far different and there are LOTS of things Apple doesn't allow and they are not above using their platform to stifle competition.
When the case in point is an email client this argument seems especially facetious. Is any customer really being defrauded because “there’s not an app for email”?
Maybe you are happy with one of the 2 shitty choices, but there might be people that would prefer to not be forced to chose what shit taste better, it is live you live in place and you have only 2 drinking water choices, both contain different poisons but you have a choice, why should people complain and try to fix a bad situation when you could chose your poison? I seen lots complaining that there is not enough competiotion in X or Y market (like mobile or ISPs ) but Apple fans don't want more competition on the iOS, you wouild thinkt he average Apple user would have been already scammed 100 times on their Macbooks because of the missing walls , this is how hard the security excuse is mentioned.
There are also three major consoles, PC, Steam, and a ton of other ways to distribute games. It's a highly competitive landscape. If you want a phone, you've got only two options.
DOJ, burn the Apple and Google monopolies to the ground.
This is a contrived point of view, and I'm sure the product managers at Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Apple, and Google would all strongly disagree.
Remember when the PS3 used to be used for super computing? Sony quietly ended that program when they realized that wasn't the business they wanted to be in.
That's not true at all. There's 2 primary OS choices, but on the Android side there's dozens of manufacturers, all with their take on things. Android is not a single option, it's hundreds. You even have choice of app stores. There's even options that have zero Google at all - like the Huawei P40 Pro. Or for an older take, silent cirlce's Blackphone or Amazon's Fire Phone. And even if you are in the very small minority that actually buys a Google phone, they even provide instructions on how to unlock the bootloader & flash a different OS: https://source.android.com/setup/build/running#unlocking-rec...
The certification process for consoles is also a lot tougher and more expensive.
1) Never need to learn what a "sideload" is
2) Never be exposed to Apps that havn't been vetted by a trustworthy party (in this case Apple)
Apple is taking the opportunity to milk app developers, but they've done an effective job of positioning the milking process so that it is done in the user's interests. It is quite possible that things like this 30% App Store tax are one of the reasons why iPhones remain so prominent.
[1]: https://www.apple.com/shop/iphone/iphone-upgrade-program
But Apple customers can be sure of that anyway--just don't sideload apps. Anything essential is going to want to be in the App Store, in order to reach customers.
The logical extension of that argument is that the Hey app would still be in the App Store and still be facing this exact problem.
If Hey became a cultural phenomenon, I'd bet that Apple would magically reinterpret their rules. This is exactly the purpose of having competition.
Please trust me on this but, even if your app is far and away the #1 grossing app on the app store and hundreds of media outlets have literally used the term "cultural phenomenon" to describe it, Apple is still a huge stickler on the rules and it still takes forever (and a lot of stress) to get approved, every single update.
This applies even if your CEO has Tim Cook's personal cellphone number and talked to him about the issues with app store approval a week before, in person.
Even now, major apps do have power. Unlike Hey, Netflix and Amazon are at least still in the App Store, and Amazon is even allowed to sell video rentals through their app without going through Apple's payment system: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/1/21203294/amazon-prime-vide...
Edit: My posts probably read like contradictions. I see it like this: (1) The safe and vetted App Store is a part of the iPhone's appeal, which (2) Apple is currently enforcing through anti-competitive tactics. If Apple wants to maintain the App Store as a product differentiator (which of course they do), they should have to do the work to keep developers happy. Where "keep happy" means very basic things like not taking a full 30% of their revenue.
I thought John Gruber laid this out pretty well: https://daringfireball.net/2020/06/hey_app_store_rejection_f...
Well, no. At some point they'd need to know what it is to decide if they wanted it or not. At some point they'd encounter an App that isn't in the App store and have to figure out sideloading. We've got a whole heap of people commenting here today who give off a distinct "I want to bypass the App Store" vibe. User hat on, I'd rather they were forced to use it.
I don't think there is enough reflecting here on just how critical a phone is. At the extremes, the US government sometimes targets predator drones based on phone GPS. I suspect an enormous number of phones contain compromising pictures. Phones contain detailed logs of where I am, who I'm talking to, and potentially access to actual records of what was said.
I really don't want to be in a situation where 'Wowfunhappy' is executing arbitrary unknown code on a phone owned by me or my family. I don't want Google and Facebook browsing through and indexing this stuff either. Apple isn't even a good gatekeeper, but they are much better than nothing.
But see, I'm think that's exactly what I'm doing--the app store gives China an easy way to take safety apps from protestors. A phone is too important for it to be out of the user's control.
I understand the security implications, but when I weigh the societal issues, Apple's model seems much more dangerous.
Imagine a world, where your Telco or anyone else for that matter can't remotely tell your phone to turn on. A world where you and only you have ultimate control over your phone, and where instead of millions of engineer hours going into making your phone convenient for developers to utilize, it is instead made easier for the user to actually understand.
That is the world I want to see. Hell I want to be part of making. I'll be damned if I can figure out how to make it work with our Market's current optimization function.
Incidentally, to the last paragraph, you can help make it work—go work on Linux mobile UX/UI. Things like the PinePhone and the Purism Librem 5 exist, and there's a market for them, they're just missing a polished user experience.
No one "eats up" that loss.
My understanding is that neither major mobile app store has done a great job of vetting.
https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2020/04/fleeceware-a...
And yet, even after being vetted malware still gets in
https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/apple-battles-app-store-mal...
I see this a lot, and to be honest, this 'Apple products are free from malware' meme has been carried on as long as I can remember in one form or another since the early Mac days. The amount of people that used to say they used Macs because 'they didn't have viruses' is about the same as the people who say 'I use iphones because Apple makes sure I'm safe'.
It's been Apple's marketing strategy for a long time, despite being slightly exaggerated, early Macs did have viruses and yes, malware makes its way onto the app store.
But Apple's marketing strategy sure has been working a long time.
I don't remember ever seeing Apple promise that 100% of apps will be 100% safe 100% of the time. Can you provide a link?
Apple's review process is done by people. People make mistakes. Things get through when bad people are trying to hide that they're doing bad things. But I'll take Apple's 1-in-a-million mistake environment over the anything goes Android environment.
You're describing the value of an app store, not the App Store. So the problem is not the value proposition, the problem is Apple's monopoly on this value proposition. It is why we can't have a Google iOS App Store, Microsoft iOS App store etc. list from which the user can pick, which would completely satisfy the convenience and peace of mind criterion, would increase competition regarding the cuts, vetting quality, curation quality etc.
No, I don't want to install your lousy app that's only a front-end to your web service anyway. Of course it gives you more control and opportunity for certain features. This only means that web browsers still have a long way to go. If apps were reasonably small, maybe I could install more of them, but as it is, it's just impossible.
Either way the back-end providers profit.
Pointing out that apple is not alone in a thread trying to raise awareness about apple's practices both distracts from apple's unethical behavior and contributes to normalizing the behavior in public perception.
So my question to you is: do you want to see these unethical behaviors end? or continue?
I get that it's unpleasant for developers who don't like the policy, and at some point it might have business consequences for Apple if they don't change the policy, but why is it unethical?
Now lets say that they also own the city bank, and they are the only one allowed to take their bank's debit card as payment. Most people don't use the other, newer bank because everybody they know is using the flee markets bank as it was first. So if you want to take credit card payments you have to sale at the flee market.
Is it still fair and good for them to continue to set all terms relating to how sales are conducted in a selfish way when they have a monopoly gained in part from first mover advantage? eh, maybe, maybe not.
Now they say that if you sale any spare parts or consumables for a product that was originally sold at the flee market, you must only do so at the flee market.
Is it still fair and good for them to use the fact that the transaction is happening on their property to set higher fees on these follow up transactions when they require these follow up transactions to happen on their property? While exploiting a first mover advantage that causes more of the initial transactions to happen on their property?
Never forget that you can't just look at each piece, the whole matters too.
Each individual piece of the macro is ethically an "eh" at most, but the whole is a bit more then "eh"
Is nothing like the situation with respect to Apple, so I don't see how your extended analogy here is relevant.
If that were the case, there would be nothing unethical about a 30% tax nor a 90% tax.
Therefore, it’s not the size that’s the problem, but the fact that the tax isn’t communicated to the consumer, and also that Apple wants you to charge the same price in-app as elsewhere (though I’m not sure if that part is enforced)
Make it a web site. Make it an Android exclusive. Do any of the dozen other things you need to do to be a success. You don't have to be on the App Store to survive. Hundreds of thousands of developers and their programs aren't.
The "problem" being your convenience. Sorry, that's not anyone's problem but yours.
This is only part of the complaint, right? The other parts is that:
* Apple has the only keys to the hardware platform.
* This is in contrast to Google or Steam, who also charge 30%, but do not completely own access to their respective hardware platforms.
* This is also in contrast to physical stores, because if a store does not sell a product (i.e. a grocery store chain does not carry some brand of beer), the product owner can usually still put it somewhere else that the consumer can freely access (excluding transportation costs).
* The policy regarding whether Apple should be entitled to the subscription fee is inconsistent and full of exceptions, which this website illustrates. My cynical take is that these exceptions have no real philosophy behind them, other than the fact that Apple needed certain major apps to be on iOS (i.e. Netflix, Tesla, Bloomberg, etc.).
* Slightly separate point, but still relevant: if Apple is entitled to subscription fees, Apple can make competitors that undercut other subscription services like Spotify, because they don't have to pay themselves the 30% fee. This is what Spotify complained about last year, and what I believe the EU is looking at. [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/16/21292651/apple-eu-antitru...
(edit log: added newlines for easier reading)
It's the part I'm interested in. I get that Apple's policy is a pain in the ass to a lot of developers, that Apple is inconsistent and arbitrary about how it applies that policy, and that all this greatly restricts developer access to users of Apple's hardware. What I don't get is how any of this is unethical. Bothersome and irritating, yes, but why unethical?
Developer don't necessarily want to distribute their software through that app store, they are forced to do that if they want to sell their software to people who happen to use that operating system. Operating system and app store are distinct products, but app store exclusively gatekeeps the functionality the user can achieve through the operating system they bought.
If app store was a standalone offering that aimed to benefit the user, there shouldn't be any problem allowing multiple competing app stores people paid for the convenience of vetted and curated apps and letting the market forces decide the winner. That is obviously not happening.
Therefore, strongarming the ecosystem and stifling market dynamics is the unethical move here. Less competition, less innovation, less user benefit, less developer income (which translates into even less innovation) etc is the price everyone pays in aggregate in order for Apple to exact its rent, which goes to their idle pile of cash or comes back to humanity as a 0.002 grams lighter iPhone++ next year.
If a business' property taxes go up, that cost is passed on to its customers. Why do people think that because something is on a phone that it should be any different?
Just like Hey doesn't tell its customers what percentage of its fee goes to the water company, or the electric company, or to company travel.
This is how business works.
I think that you and I are broadly in agreement. If Hey were allowed to charge $142 in their iPhone app, and $99 on their website, I'd think that was much less ridiculous than the situation as it stands today.
And we call those situations market failures. Besides, in this case the market failure is due to a monopolistic mechanism, which doesn't happen "all the time in every industry". If we are going to do markets, let's do it properly.
Increasing price %30 causes a corresponding decrease in the demand, and in aggregate this can cause a decrease in the total profit. The fact that the developer is forced to set a new price point this way is a source of inefficiency for the entire app economy.
Besides forced price increase is not the only harm done by the monopoly of the App Store. As this website exemplifies, it has monopoly over ontological decisions (whether a certain type of app can exist or not), over design decisions (signups, in app purchases etc) and whatnot. These are further points of inefficiency or outright failure. Apple might or might not be doing a good enough job making the best out of these decisions, but the bottom line is we don't have a choice of another player emerging with potentially better choice-making and therefore a better app store.
To the extent that this situation is a "market failure", it's not one that's fixable except by users changing their preferences.
> in this case the market failure is due to a monopolistic mechanism
Apple only has a "monopoly" on their own app store because they built it. Users are not being forced to use iPhones; they choose to because they believe iPhones give them better value overall than the alternatives. That's called free market competition, not monopoly.
By definition market failures can't be fixed by market dynamics. That is why state does tons of interventions/regulations to make it work.
> That's called free market competition, not monopoly.
No. Vertical integration means there is no free market at the integration point to begin with, which integration of a software application store with a physical phone is. We are talking about a $50bil/year market that is not free.
That's why I put "market failure" in quotes. If you think anything fixable by users changing their preferences isn't a "market failure" by your definition, fine, then the Apple situation is not a market failure by your definition.
> That is why state does tons of interventions/regulations to make it work.
No, the government does tons of interventions/regulations to favor particular market players, under the guise of "fixing market failures". In almost all cases, these interventions/regulations actually make things worse overall, but of course they make things better for the particular market players that were favored.
> Vertical integration means there is no free market at the integration point to begin with
Throwing around buzzwords proves nothing. Apple created the iPhone and its app store. It can do whatever it wants with them because it owns them. It has the market share it has because users have freely chosen to use its products instead of those of its competitors. That's the essence of a free market. The fact that you don't like doesn't make it not a free market.
These are technical terms, not buzzwords and calling them so doesn't make much of a counter-argument.
> That's the essence of a free market
No it is not. You seem to equate free market with unregulated market which is not always true. Markets fail to self-regulate in the absence of open competition, which is what precisely the App Store on iPhone is. Nearly half of the mobile phone apps in the US comes from a closed market. Imagine instead Apple owned half of the roads in the US and stipulated what businesses could use those roads, e.g. only certain grocery store's trucks can deliver goods over them. That would be far from a free market too.
The technical definitions of these terms don't support the claims you are making using them, so you're not using them as technical terms, you're using them as buzzwords.
> You seem to equate free market with unregulated market
Not at all. A free market is regulated by the voluntary choices of market participants.
> Markets fail to self-regulate in the absence of open competition
So your definition of "open competition" is "Apple can't choose the terms on which it is going to provide products and services that it built itself". By that definition, "open competition" has nothing whatever to do with "free market", since in a free market every market participant gets to choose the terms on which it is going to provide goods and services that it built itself. Forcing market participants to provide goods and services on terms they would not choose for themselves is not a free market.
> Imagine instead Apple owned half of the roads in the US and stipulated what businesses could use those roads
Roads are not the same as smartphones or apps; roads are exclusive in a way that smartphones and apps are not.
And if all that would benefit users more, users would be demanding it, or switching from iPhone to something else. But they're not. Users seem overall to be quite satisfied with what they are getting from their iPhones. So your claim here appears to be empirically false.
> strongarming the ecosystem and stifling market dynamics is the unethical move here
All this depends on your factual claim above being true, which, as I have noted, it appears not to be, based on actual user behavior.
But let's put that aside and assume that your factual claim is true. If that makes what Apple is doing unethical, then probably every single large corporation on the planet is unethical. Certainly every large corporation in the tech industry is. They all do these things; they just don't all do them with an app store.
A lack of reduction in observable demand doesn't imply an absence of cost.
Let's say the cost of having a singular app store for the user can be expressed as 99$, but the average utility they derive from using their iPhone is valued at 100$. It would be rational for that user to still prefer iPhone despite incurring great cost and we wouldn't see any drop in demand.
> Certainly every large corporation in the tech industry is. They all do these things; they just don't all do them with an app store.
That is appeal to tradition. Indeed, monopolistic nature of tech combined with vertical integration is a large unsolved problem of our era and it haven't completely played out yet.
Waving your hands and throwing random numbers around doesn't imply a presence of cost.
> That is appeal to tradition.
It is no such thing. I'm just trying to figure out what your actual position is.
> monopolistic nature of tech combined with vertical integration is a large unsolved problem
Which makes it clearer what your position is: you think the problem with tech is "monopolistic nature combined with vertical integration".
I disagree. I think the problem with tech is that it is giving away valuable things for free, or selling them at or below cost, in order to capture users and sell their data and their eyeballs or corner markets. Apple is actually the least guilty of this of the major tech players; I'm far more worried about Google and Facebook and Amazon than I am about Apple. But at any rate, that problem is not a problem of monopoly and vertical integration. It's a problem of shortsightedness in general--putting short term gain and convenience over long term stability and trust.
Come on, let's not go in circles. I posited there is a cost to user in being locked into a single app store. You claimed if there was such cost, we necessarily would have seen decrease in user demand. My handwaving numbers were to demonstrate that it doesn't have to be true, there can be substantial user costs without any decrease in user demand.
> giving away valuable things for free, or selling them at or below cost, in order to capture users and sell their data and their eyeballs or corner markets
You're close but not there. Being able to give away things for free come from the giant profits accumulated through monopolistic vertical integration. Google has a compute platform that runs a search engine/youtube that sells adds that is viewed through their browser that runs on their mobile phone. Those are multiple integration points (though not all are monopolistic). If for example Google were to pay for an external compute platform that is not theirs, they would have to pay for the profit margin of the service provider, but without is all of that money stays within the company, and that is one of the factors that enable them "giving away valuable things for free".
Data integration is a completely different game. Selling data to outside is the least powerful way to make money out of it, especially if you have other data and products. It is akin to a 3rd world country selling their raw resources. What makes the most money is the integration of multiple data sources through multiple products and even 3rd party vendors. The magic of an SQL join is that joining table-a and table-b can yield more information that neither a and b had alone. When you join the data of a browser and a search engine and 3rd party information you bought to sell more clickable ads, that is when the most money is made out of the data. The more money you make, the more you can run loss leaders, buy competitors, create barriers of entry (a la app stores), and meanwhile damage the entire ICT ecosystem in the name of even more money. That is why ensuring market health is important.
And the person to judge that question is the user, not two people having an argument on an Internet site. And not app developers either.
> You claimed if there was such cost, we necessarily would have seen decrease in user demand.
I said that if there is no discernible change in user demand, that means the users, who are the ones in a position to judge, evidently don't see a significant enough cost to change their behavior. Any change in the cost-benefit relationship will change the behavior of some users. Sure, they won't all switch from iPhones to something else, but some percentage of them will.
> Being able to give away things for free come from the giant profits accumulated through monopolistic vertical integration.
No, it comes from having some other source of revenue besides the users of the thing that is being given away for free. "Monopolistic vertical integration" might help in getting other sources of revenue, but it's not the root problem. The root problem is that the actual users of the service are not the paying customers, someone else is, so the incentives of the provider are skewed.
OSS authors could distribute on a non-commercial CC license.
Distributing under a NC-license would also go against that idea. (Apart from tipping the perception of "Open Source" towards something more restrictive which is always a bit bitter.)
Corporations buy up all the viable land, then rent rooms, or sell stock. They “bank” all your money and use it to profit for themselves.
Wax cylinders and vinyl records are like human society: round and round they go, skipping on all the same old knicks.
The financial ownership model is your real problem. Money is speech now in America.
Good luck.
Apple needs to be transparent that it's not selling devices, it's licensing devices. Users do not control the devices they own.
All search engines do this. It doesn't depend on building scale and then exploiting it. The experience is better for the user.
> Amazon kills OSS business models by offering managed OSS services on AWS at an unbeatable cost.
All cloud providers do this. It also doesn't depend on building and exploiting scale. The experience is better for the user.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/07/12/predatory-ios-app-subscri...
I don't care about Hey and I'm not an iOS user, but I would love to see this situation, which represents something increasingly accepted as normal but that none of us quite understand, forced into a proper accommodation with reality.
I was excited about hey before, and even though I don’t agree and don’t like the way the App Store works, I find Hey and the superstars behind it so hypocritical and annoying now. It’s funny how we hate here AMP and other technologies that are killing the open web, but we’re fine with a closed email system that locks you in Basecamp’s walled garden.
It has never felt so close to actually breaking up apple tight grip on its developer community, and it’s all thanks to him.
either - app value is content driven (netflix) OR - data-driven (bloomberg) OR - or physical (airbnb, amazon)
in cases where you could say, the client is the "main driver of value" they are pretty consistent.
take a game, for example -- or hey's proprietary filtering system.
that said, I don't agree with 30%, jsut my understanding
I don't understand this sentiment. You don't like the way the App Store works and a company comes along and is willing to fight against Apple for it, and then you start disliking them? Why are they hypocritical? They are pointing out flaws and being loud about them. Yes, I am aware that it's because it aligns with their financial/strategical interests, but ultimately it's a good thing that they are pressuring Apple, no?
> It’s not like they were perfectly fine with the system as long as it didn’t affect them, being one of the “famous” companies out there, while independent developers and small start-ups had to deal with this for years and years.
What about Netflix, GitHub and all of other companies who are able to get away. They are apparently big enough that Apple cares about them to bend the rules; why aren't we annoyed that they're not willing to stand up for other developers as well? They certainly should have some way of pressuring Apple.
> It’s funny how we hate here AMP and other technologies that are killing the open web, but we’re fine with a closed email system that locks you in Basecamp’s walled garden.
How is Hey "a closed email system"? It sends and receives emails using SMTP. Closed source email clients is far from a new invention and
It intentionally doesn't support IMAP, so exporting email is tricky/impossible. Whether or not you care is another thing entirely.
(With that being said, there's no reason they couldn't publish an API so someone else could write a client...)
https://exponentsmag.org/2020/02/11/antitrust-for-thee-profi...
The "oh my this is shocking and unfair" act is all a ruse. They've been well aware of this since the onset, they even copied Netflix's app text so they can feign "see we're just like them!" despite knowing they're not.
No, if you find a "trick" to get around Apple's rules[0], what happens is that you get blocked when they catch you. They might update the rules to explicitly ban what you did, but they'll gladly ban you first and change the rules later.
That's if you're little. If you're big (Google, Facebook, Uber), you might get a call from Tim Cook warning you that you need to stop what you're doing or you'll have trouble soon. Or perhaps they'll ban your cafeteria app, while leaving your consumer apps in the marketplace. Maybe you'll even get to negotiate, if you have enough leverage. But what won't happen is that Tim Cook will say "Looks like the rules don't cover this situation. Awwww, shucks!"
[0] There are some rules they don't care about (like marketing using push notifications), and enforcement of rules can be mixed. This is for the rules they care about.
Hey are trying to market an app on the app store as a 'free' app. Not offering sign up also means they don't have to add the 'offers in app purchases'.
So they're advertising the app as free. Even though its $99 a year.
Apples 30% cut is obscene and should be less. But Hey are using a 'free' label to market their app.
It is actually against Apple’s rules for Basecamp to make it any clearer.
2. Hey can be accessed via HTTP, so it's not app only.
Apple could solve this by allowing a "Free, account required" descriptor/category for Netflix/Dropbox/etc/etc.
So "Free" is a lie, but one many other apps have used beforehand.
They could add a "requires account" tag like they have "in-app purchases" but I don't think that would satisfy what Apple is looking for here (money).
"But on January 7, 1980, in response to the Hunts' accumulation, the exchange rules regarding leverage were changed, when COMEX adopted "Silver Rule 7" placing heavy restrictions on the purchase of commodities on margin. The Hunt brothers had borrowed heavily to finance their purchases, and, as the price began to fall again, dropping over 50% in just four days, they were unable to meet their obligations, causing panic in the markets."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday
An app to manage your Tesla makes no sense unless you own a Tesla. You probably (definitely?) created an account when you ordered your car, so you don't need to sign-up in app. I suppose people that could buy a used Tesla without a Tesla account, but I'm pretty sure you need to link the used car to a new account before you can manage it through the app with the new account, so it still doesn't make sense to offer in-app signup. I see no issue with the Tesla app being approved.
Some of the other apps do seem to be legitimate complaints. Netflix being an obvious one- it's totally plausible for someone to expect to download Netflix on their iPad and then pay through Apple. Netflix could easily offer that but doesn't (probably because of the 30% cut). Apple would gladly reject a smaller app, but they approve Netflix because too many users would complain if they couldn't get Netflix on their iPad.
Edit: one other thing I haven't seen whether Basecamp could just charge $141.43 per year if someone pays through Apple, so Basecamp would get $99 per year after Apple takes their 30% cut. They are allowed to offer outside subscriptions for multiplatform products, as long as those subscriptions are also available in-app. That seems like it would follow Apple's rules. People that don't care about money could sign up in-app, but most people will sign up outside the app.
Can anyone explain why some apps are mobile only, like the Shop app? I have not tried it yet as a result. Also, does Apple take a cut of those sales?
But even with Tesla it's not 100% crystal clear. There might be some buyers who pick Tesla specifically because of the fancy tech features like Summon mode. It's impossible to use Summon mode without the app. So for one of those buyers, the app is an essential part of the purchase, just like HEY subscribers who expect to read emails on their phone.
I can still drive a Tesla without the app. It's clear that the core product is car, not the app. Some people may have bought it because of a defining feature, but you are not paying $80k for Summon mode. You are paying $80k for a car that has Summon mode.
Wells Fargo offers almost all of their functionality through physical branches and ATMs. Having an app is just a feature, a bank account is clearly not an app.
I cannot use Netflix without an app or browser on my TV, phone, tablet, or computer. There are movies stored on servers, but I'm not paying $15/month unless I can watch movies. That means Netflix's core product is an app and per Apple's rules they should offer in-app purchases.
WeWork is a little harder for me. They are a real estate company but I'm not sure you could call WeWork and get a workspace over the phone nor could you do it in person (you can call a landlord directly, but that is not WeWork's product). I think their core product is that you can book a space online or with an app. I think they need to have in-app signup and purchases.
Github is the most gray one for me- once setup, I use it mostly through the command line. I could claim that the core product is not an app, but I don't honestly believe that. I use a significant part of GitHub's feature set through the browser (discovering repositories, clicking through links to read about a package before cloning it).
Or imagine a cloud-based e-book service that you can just SSH into. Should Apple allow apps marketed simply as SSH clients, but not allow an SSH client branded with that e-book service?
Most of these products are not clients. A client is something like an RSS reader, where one company makes app but interact with services/products from other companies. Netflix does not sell you a subscription to watch movies and then allow you to watch it with third-party apps. They do not expose .mp4 files, so saying "if they did this" isn't relevant. They try their hardest to force you to watch with their app.
Overall, your arguments are silly. People have common sense and can use it. Using misdirection in your words doesn't change what the functionality of the product is. Coming up with strange corner cases that don't exist and aren't viable products aren't good examples. Until an actual commercial e-book service that functions through SSH exists then Apple doesn't need to waste their time addressing it.
But I think that's pretty clearly not the case, and moreover, I think people might be just as upset if Apple's policies said "we just use our common sense to classify apps and determine which features they can use on our platform" and then appeared to apply those determinations inconsistently.
To use the service, you have to use a mobile app (or web app), the service won't let you access via POP/IMAP.
My Model X does summon using only the keyfob.
For Model 3 owners without a keyfob (it's an optional extra) - yeah, I'll give you that.
> Apps may not use their own mechanisms to unlock content or functionality, such as license keys, augmented reality markers, QR codes, etc.
> In limited circumstances, such as when features are dependent upon specific hardware to function, the app may unlock that functionality without using in-app purchase[...] You may not, however, require users to purchase unrelated products or engage in advertising or marketing activities to unlock app functionality.
They could.
>People that don't care about money could sign up in-app, but most people will sign up outside the app.
The problem is that the iOS app cannot in any way or form mention that a) you can pay for the subscription outside the application b) the price of the subscription outside of the application is different than inside the application.
Thanks. Having to hide the difference from customers is worth the fight IMHO.
There's been couple of times when I've eaten the markup that comes with paying through Apple simply because that means that I can go into my iTunes subscriptions page, hit the "stop" button on it, and it's done. No buried unsubscribe links, no "tell us why you're leaving" quiz, no disputing charges on my card. It's done and over and I don't ever have to think about it again.
If third-party payment services become the norm on the App Store, I expect a steep decline in quality of unsubscribe experiences across the board.
This is far from ideal for two reasons:
1) Some users will be paying 30% more just because they signed up in the app. How is this a good experience that protects the user?
2) most importantly, Basecamp loses the ability to manage the financial aspects of the customer relationship. They’re unable to give discounts, credit, refunds, add time to the subscription etc. It’s a hassle for all the back office management as now some customers come through a completely different billing + subscription platform.
I want to start by saying I think Apple is overstepping their bounds here and has been for years. But one reason I like the app store is because companies are generally terrible stewards. For example, I took my car to the dealer and the next week I get post cards for XM Radio (I will continue to get them for months because this has happened before). A few years ago I had a reoccurring donation to a popular Public Radio show. I was changing credit cards and was trying to update the subscription. There was no way to update it on their website or contact them to update (which included canceling). I sent email with no response. I ended up cancelling the card and with it my subscription. I'm now very skeptical about services that manage reoccurring payments.
I just had a vision of Apple demanding 30% of the cost of each Tesla sold.
I can just use Apple Pay instead of handing over my credit card. Don't want a subscription? No complicated process. No need to call a number. No need to email anyone. I just click to cancel and I am done.
As lousy as this is, the consumer experience is dramatically improved.
Nobody would be complaining if you Apple's user-base wasn't so juicy that your best option is forking over 30%. If it was easy to acquire customers outside the store it wouldn't even be an issue.
If Apple had unlisted apps that didn't show up in the store listings and required a click through from your website to get to the app's store page, I bet some developers would opt for that if it meant they didn't have to pay the 30% tax.
You could not release an app in their store and ignore their existence entirely. But that's ridiculous and you can't afford to do that because their user-base is so valuable. And so Apple charges a premium because they know that.
The idea that the App Store (with 2M+ apps) is a meaningful source of customer acquisition is utter horseshit. In fact it's now the opposite since Apple will sometimes place ads for competitor apps ahead of your own in search results.
I don’t think the App Store is the source of customer acquisition. I think being able to sell on iOS devices is the source of customer acquisition. Being able to upsell a user to your premium service right there on the device is the valuable thing that costs a premium.
The App Store is a marketplace that connects people developing for a platform (iOS) to customers using devices compatible with that platform. It is also the only marketplace that does this. In this way, it is best thought of as a (monopolistic) distribution channel.
Like it feels wrong to punish a company for not closing their platform like consoles do to any only working with a few select partners.
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For developers I think a possible strategy would be to sell two products; standard edition and iOS optimized. Charge +30% for the iOS version since Apple users are (supposedly) willing to pay more.
Personally, I'm very skeptical of subscription options since many companies are bad actors; making it difficult to cancel or throwing adds and promotions at you.
Is that worth paying $43 extra per year on a HEY subscription?
If the app says that "One year HEY subscription" is $142 and the app is from HEY itself, what reason is there to believe that it's not just the plain old price of HEY?
They're not filling some massive need; it's yet another email service. If they can't justify it at $142 a year how do they justify it at $99 a year? You reap what you sow.
Some prefer IaP, like you, so won't sign up to Hey, others don't and may actually have already paid for the service on desktop.
Apple knows that customer acquisition is extremely expensive outside the store and is charging accordingly.
The biggest issue is how big apples cut is. 30% is a lot for a company that is so impossibly wealthy.
You also act as if money on the store is coming from small Indy developers and not big corporations and mostly play to win games. Especially since the former big money makers have stopped allowing in app subscriptions.
I also am a (generally) happy iPhone user. That being said, I don't think this is a strong argument in support of Apple's monopoly on the App Store.
Make it the default so that non-techy users have no difficulties, but other methods for loading/installing apps should be allowed. If Apple's experience truly is that much better for the consumer, then let it win on its merits.