Confirmed by The Verge, who got a statement from Google:
> The open Android ecosystem lets developers distribute apps through multiple app stores. For game developers who choose to use the Play Store, we have consistent policies that are fair to developers and keep the store safe for users. While Fortnite remains available on Android, we can no longer make it available on Play because it violates our policies. However, we welcome the opportunity to continue our discussions with Epic and bring Fortnite back to Google Play.
Seems pretty rare to hear about Google having humans and not AI bots do the "discussing". Interesting that they don't trust the algorithm when it comes to allowing retailers on its video game store, but the algorithm is a-ok when it comes to performing blanket political censorship for the many millions who watch YouTube.
That is exactly how you start a lawsuit, because filing a claim in the US system requires “standing”. It’s perfect if the plaintiff can point to clear examples of this kind.
Depends on whether society thinks you’re doing it for a good cause. Laws should serve people. If “the people” think they’re unfair, they will allow lots of technically illegal actions to change them.
Mahatma Gandhi did that, and society nowadays thinks he was within his rights.
Uber also did that, but isn’t universally acclaimed for it (¿yet?)
(There’s a large legal difference in that the Gandhi was a person and Uber a company, but Uber somewhat got away with its actions. That’s an indicator that society isn’t unanimous in condemning those actions)
This could and, I think, will be similar. This strong protest by Epic will lead to change.
So? That something is predictable does not make it ethically right. That Epic could predict Apple enforcing its monopoly does not make it right for Apple to have a monopoly.
It's not irrelevant when you start argueing about being ethical.
Besides that, Epic themselves play Gatekeeper through the Epic Game Store and pay big money to ensure they are the Gatekeeper (excluding retail and other platforms), made on kids by loot boxing them.
There's a lot of research on the negative impacts of loot box systems and children and I think it's a worthy topic to mention when Epic tries to take the moral high ground of David fighting Goliath.
I completely agree there as well. I am not in any way defending Epic's use of in-game gambling. If Epic gets Apple's monopoly removed, that is a good action, independent of their immoral actions in other spheres.
Good. The sooner a big well-funded company hits this duopoly wall, the better. They will have the resources to fight this, and the outcome will hopefully be positive for all other developers.
Apple and Google are gatekeepers to all mobile devices (practically), but the value they add as gatekeepers is questionable. Certainly there is some value in their delivery (and much lesser so, their security) service; but their fees are not market set (since they are effectively monopolies by device type). If there were actual competitors, their rates would be much lower... around 2-5% probably.
Another interesting thing this could do is get some momentum behind alternative app stores on Android. They exist but they're not popular. But suppose some of the big names who are tired of Google's fees go together, choose one and put all their apps there instead. That could be enough to get people to start using it. At which point, if it was charging e.g. 5% instead of 30%, many other apps would move there too.
It could be the best thing to happen in this space for a while.
If you want the alternative app stores to become more popular like you say, there's no better place to actually name some of them than in the comment you just made.
A lot of the 'alternative' app stores are either for piracy or for heavily fringe content (think NSFW) or open source only like F-droid. There are also app stores that are region specific e.g. east asia or Russian-speaking. It is difficult to find international, mainstream general purpose app stores.
That's because Google made it so third party app stores can't install apps in the background, auto-upgrade or batch install multiple apps.
Users expect to be able to do that, so it is a non-starter to run a commercial app store that Google's already turned into a second class citizen on Android.
I think it is impossible to have a "truly great alternative" app store that doesn't include basic functionality that all the competing App Stores have, and Linux has had for decades.
Surely other app stores should be able to compete on an even playing field with Google, and be allowed to implement background installation, auto-upgrading and batch installation of apps.
Would it even matter? Google has tied so much critical functionality into their Play API that they could probably just flip a switch, and any app that didn't go through their own store would lose huge amounts of capabilities that Google has locked up.
This is a fine - even advantageous - for open stores like F-Droid, as the target market is users who explicitly don't want more Google spyware on their phone. But for large software companies pushing out profitable apps that require Play apis, it wouldn't be feasible.
Dumb question but if there is no collusion between the companies in a duopoly, is it still illegal in the US? Or does it have to be a monopoly to be illegal?
They both carefully added up all their costs and each independently arrived at a fair 30% fee, even though entire physical supply chains can undercut this percent.
There are already alternative app stores on Android (perhaps most notably, Amazon) and that hasn't impacted their 30%... so what exactly are you expecting?
These alternative App Stores are heavily restricted when it comes to updating or even just installing apps, unless they were installed into the system and the system was patched by the OEM.
They are different markets. If you have an iPhone you must use Apple's store, Google's store is not competition for that market. For Google, use of the store is not required, but there's a risk to side-loading because ideally there would be competing stores that also do quality control and security audits, and there aren't. So it isn't a duopoly, it's one absolute monopoly and one near-monopoly.
The legal definition of a "market" is always going to be somewhat subjective and arbitrary. I doubt whether a US federal court would define the market the same way you did.
The predominant test is market or pricing power, whether the people you are selling the good or service move to putative competitors in response to pricing/conditions changes you make. If Apple makes their terms more onerous, does it drive purchasers of their app distribution service to the Play Store? If not, they aren't competing in the same market.
Epic Games hasn't purchased any app distribution services from Apple or Google. Epic is the vendor here, not the customer. The money flows from Apple to Epic.
What Apple is doing feels unfair, but making an antitrust case against them is going to be a stretch with current laws.
If I want to buy a game to play on my phone, and there is only one seller, it's a monopoly. Yes, I could buy a new phone, and then buy the game from a different store. But then I'd be buying a different product (Fortnite for Android instead of Fortnite for iPhone).
It depends on how the court decides to define the market. Is the market limited to Fortnite on Apple devices? All games on Apple devices? Fortnite on all devices? All video games everywhere? The laws and precedents provide some general guidance but there's no clear and simple procedure defined for deciding what constitutes the "market" in the context of a particular case. Don't presume to know what a court will decide. In particular the legal concept of a product doesn't work the way you describe.
Monopolies aren’t illegal per se in the US if they were acquired lawfully. What’s illegal is using monopoly power in a prohibited way. However, collusion (even tacit collusion) can be illegal even if there’s no monopoly by a single company, e.g., market sharing[1].
Note: Not a legal expert, this is just my understanding.
“ Apple and Google are gatekeepers to all mobile devices (practically), but the value they add as gatekeepers is questionable”
If you own an app and remove it from all App Stores, you’ll quickly see what value they add. It’s the millions of users who are able to download your product.
It's not a coincidence and I have never heard a claim it was. Apple set it at 30% and Google decided not to compete on price. Of course it is legal to set the price of your product based on a competitor.
I actually don't disagree with this, I just said it is not some "coincidence". Apple was first, Google decided to follow. Good for consumers? Probably not.
When competitors non-coincidentally decide to set their prices the same arbitrary number, that's called "price fixing" and it is potentially an antitrust issue.
Top of the funnel discovery and verifying the app won't do malicious things is value. It's debatable if that's worth 30% of all in-app purchases (but then those also get the value of a trusted payment processor too). But it's silly to imagine that app developers aren't getting value from being in app stores.
What's questionable, AznHisoka, is what value the gatekeepers add for consumers by charging such a high tax.
Most of the value is being provided by the app developers.
30 - 50% is an acceptable markup in the retail world, like a bricks and mortar store selling furniture, but the purchase of virtual currency is not the same as a retail transaction. It's closer to the sort of service a money changer provides, or even a credit card merchant. The fee for such as service should be in the range of 3 - 18%, not 30%.
You are right, zepto, that developing, maintaining, and delivering the App Store requires work and resources, and Apple should be compensated fairly for it.
App store owners are compensated fairly by the 30% fee they charge as commission on sales. But the Fortnite case is not about sales. It is about the re-supply of virtual currency for use within a game. The customer is already established. There is no new selling or marketing or delivery required of the app store owner.
To recognise the differences between product sales vs ongoing consumable resupply, such as virtual currency, app store vendors should do what physical world vendors do and charge different fees that are commensurate with the value add.
Retailers charge 30-50% markup to cover the overheads of rent and sales staff. What Apple does with the app store is similar, and so their 30% fee is in step.
Forex dealers and banks charge 3% - 18% for financial transactions such as currency exchange and credit card financing. Given that Apple isn't even providing financing for Fortnite's virtual currency, a fee in the order of 5 - 10% would be reasonable in this case.
What's at stake here should not be the all or nothing duel that Apple has initiated by banning Fortnite from the App store. Apple should just evolve, and introduce a second tier charge for consumables.
Would it make sense for Walmart to charge one price (say $100) for every item it sells in every one of its stores? Of course not. Walmart and every other real world retailer charges different prices for different things, depending on how much value they add. Apple should do the same.
Apple didn’t initiate a hidden feature for an in-app store (flagrant violation) + an accompanying ad blitz + lawsuit. That said I kinda like the argument of currency, the problem I guess for Apple is that what’s the difference between fortnite bucks and any other IAP? I mean how would Apple differentiate it. Why not just make every app surrounded by a layer of conversion to your fake currency to get your commission down?
Wondering if instead Apple should look at pricing breaks when a customer spends over a certain amount on IAP or certain repeat transactions. In effect trying to differentiate the take they get for whatever initial bit but incentivize monetizing customers for the long haul. That has precedent with the subscription model they have been pushing to achieve similar pricing breaks as a compromise down to 15%
As you point out, awinder, it would be possible to rort the rules by charging zero for the app, and then making the bulk of the revenue come from the IAP, if the former costs 30% and the latter costs 0%.
Apple could overcome those technical nonsensibilities by simply defining a second tier lower charge of say 10% in a common sense way, and then granting second tier status to the kinds of transactions that deserve it in a common sense interpretation.
Without a second tier to app store pricing, Apple is not going to please all the people all of the time. Dissatisfaction is inevitable.
With a second tier, sensibly applied, everyone's a winner, all of the time.
I'm a human, xref. And I am new to Hacker News. If you feel that I am not fitting in with your expectations for the culture here, please feel free to suggest ways to improve our interaction. I will listen to you with open ears.
When you say "devoid of content" is that a criticism because you don't agree with my proposal that Apple introduce tiered pricing? Or something else? Would you care to elaborate?
There is a way you don’t seem to be taking this debate seriously. But in my view I doubt that means you are a bot.
For example your walmart analogy isn’t an analogy of anything in this situation and you don’t explain that.
And of now you are talking about Apple using common sense rules to decide what is an is acceptable, which of course is what they think they have been doing all along. People disagree on what is common sense.
The pattern is that you appear to be making interesting but flawed suggestions and then not taking seriously people’s responses to them.
I have bought (for money) hundreds of iPad apps. Maybe 2 or 3 have been complete and total duds. I’ve bought (for money) tens of pieces of software directly from the developers’ websites with at least as many complete and total duds.
I’ll take the App Store experience thanks. Doesn’t matter to me what they charge. If developers want my money they’ll take the 30% haircut.
Android has a plethora of app stores, there have always been tons of them. Some phones have shipped with three or more, one from Google, one from the phone manufacturer and one from the network. Then you could add another one from Amazon, etc, etc.
Google Play Store won out on Android simply because the multitude of stores was a nightmare for customers. They don’t want multiple stores, they want one store on this phone, that will also be on their next phone. Any ‘monopoly’ wasn’t seized by Google, it was pushed eagerly on them by customers craving consolidation and simplicity.
Same for me, I don’t want 5 blasted stores on my iPhone. I want one store and run by someone I trust. The same goes for my Switch too, I’m quite happy for Nintendo to run the store for it. If I don’t like how they run it, I’ll get a PS 5 or XBOX. That’s where the competition is. I have plenty of choices thanks.
Wasn't the old Nokia Maemo OS based on Debian? I seem to remember being able to `apt-get install` things in the terminal on my N770 (or whatever the model was) tablet.
For the record Maemo spawned among other things Sailfish OS (running on my dakly smartphone) and many current mobile Linux distro projects can trace their lineage to Maemo on the Nokia N-series.
Yep, and I think a few Meego derivatives might still be out there, as well. Also, Maemo was revived as Maemo Leste for platforms like the Pinephone, although I'm not sure how active the project is.
Is your iPhone primarily a gaming device? I don't understand how you're seamlessly leaping from "Phone" to "Game console" and making equivalency comparisons. In my ways my phone/computer is an extension of who I am as a person. They are my second brain. Having that functionality dictated by a company feels nightmarish to me. Imagine if you didn't want to be blasted by multiple internet forums, multiple news feeds, or even multiple websites. Why have more than one website on the internet? Have the entire internet be a single website run by someone you trust. That's the natural conclusion of where your preference leads.
The 'your iPhone is an Xbox' is the Gruber approved narrative as of last week, the Apple community left defending this is sextupling down on that idea.
I was describing the iPad as an "app console" back in 2010 (https://tracks.ranea.org/post/1432038656/geek-luddites). It's not at all impossible Gruber read my blog post on that back then, in fact, as it was linked around a few places.
I think you're getting a bit hung up on the language -- "appliance" and "console" are trying to communicate basically the same thing, e.g., a device which on a technical level could absolutely be a general purpose computing platform but has been restricted from that by design.
I haven’t read Gruber in years and the literal first thing I thought when the “they don’t let other people use their platform” argument was made is “Why would this not apply to any other platform, <think of another highly locked down platform> like consoles!”
And even assuming the antitrust/monopoly argument holds, is there some barely-known exception to “general devices only”?
I’d love it if I could load my own stuff onto consoles, but don’t see how this could be practically compelled in a way that isn’t massively impactful to _everything_, especially with security and piracy implications.
Last time I checked I didn’t use my Switch to check emails, download the Covid App, pay in a store, download and send documents or board a flight. The smartphone is an important driver for my daily life, a console is not.
I’ve been saying the exact same thing for about a decade. Check my HN comment history on Algolia.
Nevertheless I think Apple are making some missteps. I think they made a mistake on the game streaming service decision. Epic can go take a running jump though.
Like iOS devices, all major consoles are locked down and limited to what's in a single app store. Any argument in favor of forcing Apple to allow multiple app stores would also apply to consoles.
I think there's an argument to be made that in practice, smartphones are typically used by most users as general purpose computing devices, while game consoles, despite being technically capable of being general purpose devices, are typically used for a specific purpose.
That being said, I would be perfectly happy if an outcome of this was that end users were able to install whatever software they liked on game consoles.
Let's assume that phones are general purpose computing devices.
So what ? There is no legal requirement that computers must have user-installable apps or comply with some standard around openness. Nor is there some rationale as to why computers should be treated differently to any other device that can run apps.
And if Sony decides to ship a browser with PS5 does it suddenly switch to a general purpose computer device and must allow competing app stores. And if they remove it does it switch back to a console.
The whole concept is completely nonsensical and unworkable.
Separate the hardware from the software. The devices:phones or consoles, as hardware ARE general purpose computing capable.
The software limitations is where the arbitrary restrictions come in. But as you say there is no legal requirement for "user-installable apps".
But there ARE laws about anti-competitive behaviour. Whether they apply? The courts will decide soon I guess.
I can see it from the point where Apple makes Apps and yet also profits from their competitors Apps.
Mind you, I can also see a reasoning that by keeping an App in the market Apple can set a base minimum for quality, hence setting a floor for the experience for end users. But they could do that via their gatekeeping anyway too...
A smartphone has a pretty defined purpose: communication. It's powerful and generic enough to be a general purpose computing device, sure, but the vast majority of users use it to do just that: make calls, send messages (whether via traditional SMS or social media offerings). It has some secondary usage such as internet browsing (primarily consuming streamed content, these days) and photography (largely for messaging/social media purposes). Occasionally it might be used for something more heavy duty, like some light editing of photos and videos. Some people play games on it. But it's still oriented around being a communication device.
There isn't much difference between that and a modern gaming console (apart from the orientation being around games/interactive entertainment). Take my PS4, for example: beyond the games there's pretty capable light photo and video editing software, a web browser (based on Webkit, actually, and has a surprisingly pleasant and minimal UI/UX even when using just the controller and not an external keyboard and mouse), a ton of content apps (Netflix, Disney+, Spotify, YouTube, DAZN, etc) as well as Twitch and the Playstation Network platform (essentially social media). In my opinion the only thing holding it back from gaining more apps and completely eating up the lower end of the desktop market is that developing apps for it is prohibitively expensive (gotta order a dev kit). Even at that I still plan to keep it around as a very light desktop alternative when I replace it with the next generation.
That existed for years in the form of Windows RT. It's also an option in Windows 10 called S mode.[1] I wouldn't buy such a device for myself, but I'd certainly consider it for my grandmother. It seems like a useful way to prevent naive users from installing malware.
If your phone is an extension of your person, and you don't like how that extension works, then replace that extension with a different one. There are plenty of phones on the market.
This is completely false. The Play Store has "won" by Google chopping the legs off all the alternatives. They have to be sideloaded and you have to enable a scary checkbox to do so, that suggests it's less secure to use any app store but the Play Store.
Of course they have to put a scary checkbox, otherwise they would be held liable for any sketchy app that is actually malware people accidentally downloaded. And I guarantee if the checkbox wasn’t there, you would be complaining that there aren’t enough safeguards to keep people safe. I can’t even stand Google, but come on.
> And I guarantee if the checkbox wasn’t there, you would be complaining that there aren’t enough safeguards to keep people safe.
I hope what you mean is that someone else would be making the argument that the checkbox is necessary: claiming a crowd of people are a single inconsistent argument is disingenuous.
But the opposing crowd exists and maybe you personally don't have to deal with it but these companies do. Apple and Google deal with billions of ordinary people, not just tech nerds.
> Of course they have to put a scary checkbox, otherwise they would be held liable for any sketchy app that is actually malware people accidentally downloaded.
What do you mean by "held liable"? It can't be in the legal sense, because Microsoft has never been held legally liable for Windows malware, and Apple has never been held legally liable for Mac malware.
"In 2014 the US Federal Trade Commission ordered Apple to pay out $32.3m (£24.6m) to reimburse American parents for unauthorised app purchases made by their children."[0]
Please, in what way is Apple liable for this other than the fact they need to hold someone accountable for the damages? You really can’t imagine this taking place for malware that compromises payment information? They may not be ordered to pay but the headlines would read the same and the negative PR is worth way more than a few million.
But again, Mac malware exists, Windows malware exists. Yet "sideloading" is still much easier on those platforms than on Android. So obviously this kind of "liability", i.e., bad PR, doesn't and hasn't required the same implementation, and certainly doesn't force them to make the platforms App Store only.
And also third party app stores (e.g. F-droid) can't autoupdate the apps for "security" reasons. One can only circumvent this by flashing a patch via phone recovery... which is fairly tedious and scary even for a tecnhical person, let alone regular users.
My Firefox mobile was updated during the night and changed the UI completely, moving the bar to the bottom etc and it is just all bad. I see not having auto updates as a feature. Mostly it is just annoying changes and I prefer to know when updates happens so I can track things that break and blame the update.
I don't find it easy to have to individually upgrade each app because Google decided that third part app stores are not allowed to batch upgrade in the background.
Wait, this is news to me! What aspect of Android is making autoupdates impossible? Apps can replace their contents, and apps can run in the background... shouldn't that be all you need?
Android requires users to go through the explicit install and upgrade screen to upgrade apps outside of the Play Store. That means that F-Droid can't upgrade applications in the background, nor can they be upgraded automatically. Batch installs are also disabled for third party app stores.
But isn't an app fundamentally just a collection of files? What is stopping F-Droid from replacing those files? Are executable bits special or something?
Look into the Android security model, it's more complicated than vanilla Linux where you can just log in as root and fiddle with files if you want to get something done.
Android apps are heavily containerized, so unless you gave the app a filesystem permission, it can't write to it. By default they can only use their 'own' data storage (which is represented as /data/data/$APPNAME on the filesystem).
But even if you allow filesystem access, it's only for 'non-system' partitions (e.g. sdcard). Unless you rooted your phone (also a pretty tedious operation with a potential to brick the phone), normal apps can't even read files on the system partition, let alone overwrite them, except their 'own' data.
This is good from the security point, e.g. you can run pretty much any app and simply remove it if you feel like it's suspicious and asking for too many permissions. Similar to running a random Docker image: you can try out software without taking risks of losing control over your system, allowing certain capabilities if necessary (e.g. ports, paths). There might be a Docker vulnerability of course, but it's pretty unlikely for you as an individual to be targeted by it.
But it's extremely frustrating when you know what are you doing and which risks you are willing to take, but have to jump through hoops to do things that are otherwise trivial on desktop.
I've reread your comments, and realized I might have answered a different question in my comment before :)
In theory, you could request broad permissions, and have an interpreter sitting inside your app, dynamically loading its own code over the wire, so you'll never have to update from the app store (unless you want more permissions granted).
But as far as I understand, this is forbidden by the Play Store policies (e.g. Facebook got told off for doing this https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/googl... ). Although I'd imagine it's easy to slip such code past reviewers, unless your app is very popular and worthy a more thorough review that can catch it.
Also I'd imagine there is some grey area there, e.g. your whole app could be a webview simply displaying web frontend -- surely it's okay to dynamically load javascript? Not sure how the policy works in such cases.
if the app wants more downloads, they will try to get into the main store. if the main store won't accept them for whatever reason, then it's either no store or a side store. I'll take the side store.
> Yeah? you think users love hunting down a particular app store becauase that is the one that has the app you are after???
I switch between streaming services based on the content they have. I have Steam, Epic Store and Origin on my PC because of the games and deals each have. Why would I not load a new app store (if I used my phone for anything other than a phone, camera and note-taking device)?
Because no one bothered to write viruses for it. There were more viruses for Windows than Classic MacOS and it was a complete shit show compared to Windows between 1995 - 2000. It didn’t even have memory protection.
And again it’s because no one bothered to write toolbars and viruses for the Mac. I never got viruses on a Windows PC but are you going to say they don’t exist? You never had to clean up your less tech savvy relatives computer?
What I’m saying is that the vast, vast majority of desktop users have an entirely satisfactory computing experience today, using operating systems that let you install whatever you want.
Yes, if you go back in time you find OSes with hideous security models that made things like keyloggers possible. Mobile OSes today do not have those problems, and have strict permission prompts that gatekeep functionality.
Yeah, I’m sure there would be some shitty experiences if people could install whatever they want on their phones, it’s the price of giving everyone that freedom. But if desktop OSes in 2020 are anything to go by, it’s really not that big of an issue.
Your Mac isn’t ridden with that, because you’re a user that knows that you’re doing. I see “regular users whose Macs are riddled with MacKeeper and other garbage all the time
In 2006-ish—before the iPhone and its App Store—preteen me decided to replace Windows with Xubuntu on his hand-me-down computer.
The feature I recall liking most was the integrated software center. When I wanted an app, I just had to search the center, not comb through random websites. It was nice.
Of course, I could and did also install programs from random websites, as I saw fit. It never occurred to me that some day, I'd be forced to rely entirely on a built-in store...
It very well may be less secure. This is no different than warning boxes popping up on Windows/MacOS cautioning running executables downloaded from untrusted sources.
Good! Apple may ask for a bit too much with the 30 percent but still doesn’t give Epic the right to try and do things on their own. Judging on their little trailer they released shortly after getting removed, they new this was going to happen. A company that makes so much money should be able to compromise.
> A company that makes so much money should be able to compromise.
It's hilarious to see people rooting for Apple as if they're the little guys.
The company that makes so much money here is Apple, not Epic. They should be willing to compromise. They gouge app developers and in turn its end users by charging a 30% ransom.
How do you rationalize this? There's no situation where having a legitimate competitor to the App Store makes the situation somehow worse for smaller developers.
At worst, they continue their business as usual. At best the competitive pressure allows their business to stay the same but with higher margins. Most likely they would eke out a bit more money than the status quo by using another App Store competitor alongside the App Store if they choose to do so.
The irony of calling an app developer "big and greedy" in face of Apple is not lost on me here.
30% in pure profit would means a lot to regular companies/folks as well, not just the "big and greedy" ones. Just because you don't feel the pain doesn't mean other ones do.
And ultimately, some of this cost is burdened by the end user purchasing the app which is obviously harmful to everyday users such as myself.
I'm not aware of another industry that puts up with 30% fees on all the products that they sell. GrubHub et al are notorious in the restaurant industry for their 30% cuts on orders, and owners are doing everything they can to eliminate those companies from the picture.
Artists, on the other hand, only have to deal with a 10% to 15% cut when they sell their music digitally or physically through Bandcamp.
I'm a small and modest developer, and I feel like 30% and $99/year is too much. Mind you, Apple is a trillion dollar company that will take a 30% cut whether you're a worker in the 3rd world or a kid in college. I'm not sure I follow your "big and greedy" rhetoric at all here.
Related: I often find item bundles cheaper if I buy them via the Samsung Galaxy Store (10% cheaper). Is it because Samsung doesn't have keep 30% of the money, but a lower amount?
The scary check box exists for a reason. The reason malware isn't everywhere on android and iOS is because randomly installing apps isn't unsafe. I mean sans play store's automatic tools occasionally letting nonsense through.
A large part of the security model on both systems is the ability to constrain what apps can do, and by ensuring those have happened.
The various privileged (in the security sense) sandbox entitlements on iOS can't be used by a malicious app because the malicious app can't get through the App Store. That significantly increases the bar for any malware. I assume the Google Play store similarly limits access to privileged system features, and I would fully expect the 3rd party stores do not.
Also personally: The Epic store is a terrible app, and signing up for it requires providing vastly more information to them than I ever wanted to, especially for only a single company's games, from a company that has no stated intent of reducing data collection and improving privacy. A company that also engages in scummy tactics like loot boxes, virtual currency, etc
Right because why would Google think it needs to warn people about the dangers imposed by installing an app outside of the Google Play store by a well known developer like Epic?
> that suggests it's less secure to use any app store but the Play Store.
The suggestion is usually correct, though. Google does a terrible job of vetting Play Store apps, but they do still have some automated safety checks, and they kick out known malware once it's found.
If you allow sideloading, you give up all of that. It's still perfectly safe if you trust what you install, but you have to make that assessment. Google can't save you.
This is exactly how I wish iOS worked. It's also basically how the Mac works nowadays, except replace "App Store" with "Apple notary service."
How would you suggest Google correctly communicate the risk?
Maybe a little, but more importantly, all apps on F-Droid are open source, and verifibly built from said source. It's very hard to hide malicious activity on it, whereas duping the Play Store content moderators is like taking candy from a baby.
For a small apps there's nothing checking against intentional malicious activity. Sure it'd be there in plain sight, but it's pretty unlikely really that anyone would read the source code of some random single person project.
>They have to be sideloaded and you have to enable a scary checkbox to do so
And windows has a scary sounding checkbox when you download an .exe from the internet. So what? In the old days, it never warned you, and people were CONSTANTLY getting malware by downloading random stuff from sketchy sites.
Majority of Android phones shipped in last years were built by Samsung and Huawei which both ship their own app store by default. Your claim doesn't match the reality.
ok... and I'd rather be allowed to install on my phone what I want. so you can have your main store, let us have your side stores. gentoo has a main overlay of software, but I'm free to checkout anyone else's overlay and install software, this should be no different.
> Same for me, I don’t want 5 blasted stores on my iPhone. I want one store and run by someone I trust.
The individual stores thing is actually really annoying. If you play games on Windows you're familiar with this situation. They all want to run 24/7 and cram their UI in your face at every opportunity, and you just want to play that publisher's one game. They are trying to become chat apps, and web browsers, and it's just crazy. I think my computer will explode if it sees one more web page wrapped in a "start at login" script claiming to be an "app store" or "game launcher". (Why can't these things just let me "chocolatey install" them? I know how to keep Windows apps up to date. Just accept my credit card number from inside the app. Or, horrors, a web page.)
On Windows, the underlying cause of this is "because we can". Everyone that wants a game will install an app store to get it from without thinking, because the one Microsoft offers is too limited. (They don't use Steam because it's run by a direct competitor, and Steam games kind of have that feeling like there are 3 good games in there next to 100,000,000 "I downloaded Unity this weekend, give me money!" games.)
Where I'm going with this rant is that unlimited freedom is the worst form of app distribution -- except for all the others. (I guess I have zero qualms with "go get". It works 100% of the time. Apps can't explode files all over my computer. Google provides a CDN for free.)
They could do DRM and all the other store stuff by linking against publisher-provided DLL. This is about an upsell opportunity - the store is there to ensure their offers are in your face whenever you want to play.
You could do that if Epic wanted you to be able to do that. Nothing on Android prevents it; in fact, that's how you install the Epic Game Store: you go to their website and download an APK. You'll have to click through some permission screens, and then you're done: the APK is installed on your phone and can be launched like any normal app, no Play store required.
Epic chooses not to do that, because they want you to run their store. But Google doesn't prevent you from doing it; Epic just chooses not to allow you to.
There is GOG Galaxy[0], that is trying to gather all your games from different platforms in one place. However all platforms (except Steam) constantly disconnects from the Galaxy which is really annoying. I understand there can be a lot of reasons for this. But I like to think that those emerging platforms simply do not want being accessed from the Galaxy. For this reason I prefer buying games from GOG and Steam when possible.
Also, to install games from those 3rd party platforms one still needs to install and launch those platforms. So this limits usefulness of the Galaxy.
Sometimes it looks like this.
But in some sense unlike this new "standard" previous 14 standards don't really cover "all use cases".
Only the app from GOG shows games from other platforms, that's why I prefer to launch everything from there because when I launch my windows rig on weekends no chance I remember where I bought that game.
If there's one thing I don't understand about other PC gamers, it's why any of them want to use these stores in the first place.
Whenever possible, I buy from GoG, but not because I want to use Galaxy. With GoG, I just download an exe, run the installer, and my game appears in this wonderful launcher called The Freaking Start Menu. It's great.
What do I get from using a client? I don't want my games to be integrated into a social network, I just want to play them, and not be interrupted until I'm done.
------
My second choice after GoG is usually itch.io, but my third choice is actually becoming EGS. I'm not sure if this was intentional, but a significant portion (maybe even a majority?) of EGS games don't actually need EGS to run. You can download them with an open-source tool like https://github.com/derrod/legendary, back up the files, and run them. I've personally done this with Journey, Beyond Two Souls, Control, and Detroit.
A handful of Steam games allow this too (one recent example is Ori and the Will of the Wisps), but it's much less common than on the Epic Store!
For me, most everything is run through Steam. Steam games, games from GoG/EGS/Origin/GamePass, emulators, all that.
Big picture mode, controller mapping, remote play, and remote play together are amazing.
Not sure what's so hard to understand. You mention downloading, installing, and revel that it's in your start menu. And don't mention updating. With launchers, there's one less step (installing), and updating is a passive thing (for better or worse). And yup, they're placed in the start menu as well.
Recently I've started using OS search to launch apps on my Ubuntu workstation. One day I've tried the same with game launched. When you have extensive libraries on multiple platforms it definitely helps.
Also some clients support achievements. It adds incentives (or meaning, if you will) to play some good game even after completion of campaign or something like that. Yep, not for everyone.
BTW, you can download and install games from Steam using official console client [0]. Not sure if will allow to play [all] games, though. I had limited experience with that. I managed to download windows versions of doom and quake 2 for Oculus Quest from Ubuntu.
> BTW, you can download and install games from Steam using official console client [0]. Not sure if will allow to play [all] games, though. I had limited experience with that.
Yeah, SteamCMD can download but usually not run games—my experience is the only games that run are the handful that can run without Steam in general.
Key reasons I use steam:
1. My payment information is there
2. Updates happen automatically in the background
3. I can stream games from my pc to laptops
4. I can uninstall and reinstall later without having to try to figure out where to re-download the game from
For me the main reason has been the Linux support in Steam. If they later add a Linux port, you don't have to buy it again, just go install it on Linux.
Their work with the Proton compatibility is bringing a lot of my old Windows only games to Linux too. I'll probably continue buying exclusively from Steam for this reason.
> “ If you play games on Windows you're familiar with this situation. They all want to run 24/7 and cram their UI in your face at every opportunity, and you just want to play that publisher's one game.”
Yes, thank you! In fact Epic is one of the worst of these stupid stores about blasting you with corner-of-screen advertising even when you’re doing nothing with it.
I agree 100%, although I will give Steam some credit: when it launched it was universally maligned, but with enough work it became probably the digital storefront people are most loyal to, and for some justifiable reasons; and it passes the most important test: many prefer it to piracy.
Go get is weird. I guess it’s still federated even with GOPROXY as a middleman, but I am still not sure how I feel about all of it. It makes sense from the perspective of ensuring things don’t maliciously break, but it feels less obvious what it’s doing than I’d hope, and that probably makes many uneasy.
Are there any well-curated and maintained app store alternatives?
I'd love to keep Google Play off my phone if there were a competitor who did a better job at surfacing truly great apps (rather than the garbage suggestions Google spams me with) and passed on a bigger piece of the pie to publishers.
> Same for me, I don’t want 5 blasted stores on my iPhone. I want one store and run by someone I trust
To be honest, I wouldn't mind having the option to specify multiple stores that I trust the same way I do the Google Play store. I could imagine having Google Play, the Epic store, the Blizzard store, and Steam on my phone if that were necessary.
I am not worried about being spammed with stuff, as apps don't run until you open them, normally, and I already have granular controls over what notifications spam me on Android as it is.
Oh, it really would be. :D I meant more that if one did have it, I would not be afraid to get spammed with notifications, any more than i already am (and turn them off...) for any other game or app I install.
I'm a customer. I do not want to vet all brand quality for each brand individually. I want to be able to choose between a few pre-vetted options that I can already trust.
I want stores like Costco and Apple's AppStore because I trust those companies to vet brand quality and provide me a basic level of trust for the products. I'm happy to pay a 30% premium for that piece of mind.
On the other hand I would like the option to add another App Store who's "Brand of quality and trust to vet apps" I can compare to Apple's store... and so the layers go...
On the gripping hand, it is the "benevolent dictator" problem. A benevolent dictator really can be an efficient and great way to run things. For the people that agree with the dictator.
But who determines who the dictator should be and what makes them benevolent?
Vetting is separate from selling. There can be a vetting service that just links to direct downloads. I use stuff like that on my PC all the time. The only reason to lock the obtaining of a product behind the vetting service is to grab money.
I can understand that having multiple store can be frustrating for the user, but why not have multiple stores with federation? You have one app implementing the federated store protocol, and you and browse all federated stores.
This would allow multiple actors to be present, while keeping things simple for the users.
This already exists on desktop Linux - all the deb/RPM/Flatpak repositories each have a standardized metadata format, so you just add a URL to the given repo and the OS will work with it the same way as with the default repositories.
Didn't Linux package repos solve this like 20 years ago? The store app (or yum/apt/whatever) is the entry point then you load in as many repo URLs as you want. Can't that model expand to phones?
It's basically how my Fire TV worked. I could search for a title in the home screen and it would tell me that it was on Prime Video, Hulu, Netflix or I could rent from Amazon or whatever.
The only reason Linux doesn't have malware/viruses is because the number of people running it on the desktop is basically zero. And the people using them are much more technically savvy so it's really not worth anyone's trouble.
Now if you were to take the package model and move it to Windows it would be the same mess we have today.
Many of us, including Apple, do not want ransomware, malware and viruses on their phone. It's not a computer. It's a phone.
IIRC FB and Uber both got caught doing things other companies couldn't do. Apple's vetting process is not foolproof either. Apps still do things I don't want them to do, on my own device.
Apple can still control the OS and device and sandbox the apps and app stores. It's not an insurmountable problem.
So either use Google’s insecure App Store, use someone else’s insecure app that’s sideloaded or by an iPhone. I think you just made a good pro-Apple argument.
The problem I have with one-store-to-rule-them-all is that it has to be run by somebody, and I never agree with the decisions of one judge 100% of the time. So I like to have the option to get software somewhere else. I purchased the device, after all.
Not just the user, but the developers want a single store. As a developer you are focused on writing apps; you don't want to spend energy to figure out how to upload apps to 5 different stores, understand their individual requirements like app descriptions and screenshots, manage 5 sets of credentials and certificates, deal with 5 different review processes, etc.
Just ask any android developer who develop for the Chinese market where Google is absent. It's a nightmare.
I want one just one grocery store! Want less common ingredients? NO! I just want one store! I want just one hardware store! Want some part they don't carry? Sucks to be you.
Just one car store, etc...
If nothing else I at least one two stores. One for regular apps and one for porn apps. You can see steam now has lots of adult apps.
Are you saying people avoid other stores even though they know about them? Then I disagree. If I ask people I know in real life, they can't tell any other app store besides Google's. Even if their phone includes others. Every phone comes pre-installed with play store. Then they don't look for another store, they never need that. People learn and teach others how to install apps only from play store.
I don't want 5 blasted distribution methods on my (Android) phone. I'm perfectly happy with 5 different sources, though. Put plainly: I want repositories, not stores. I get to use the same tool (app) to manage all of them, and I can add different sources if I'd like.
> I don’t want 5 blasted stores on my iPhone. I want one store and run by someone I trust.
You must be representing the first generation that is anti-competition and pro-monopoly. It makes no sense that you would really want to have fewer options to buy a product. If the problem is trust, then clearly what you need is regulation, not a monopoly.
> If there were actual competitors, their rates would be much lower... around 2-5% probably.
Now that's an interesting (though highly impractical) idea!
Imagine both app stores on every phone, providing the exact same service. There's probably no room for price fixing here, because Apple's market share is far smaller than Android's, so Apple would have a significant incentive to reduce the fees (and snatch some of Google's customers.
Now add two or three other "app store providers", and things get interesting.
Gatekeeping is never about adding value; it's about removing or keeping out [whatever is the opposite of value]. A subtle difference but one to keep in mind.
I'm not sure that's true? Gatekeeping is definitely about keeping out/removing, but that doesn't mean that it has zero or negative value?
For example, there's absolutely positive value for users in filtering spam. This tends to be negative value for spam senders, but that doesn't detract from the user value.
Keeping out bad (in their opinion) UX constitutes the valid part of their gatekeeping because it subtracts negative value, which almost amounts to adding value, but is subtly different, like I said. Keeping out competition is a little harder to justify since it presumably only benefits them. And that does tend to be a temptation for all gatekeepers. But in neither case is value really being added directly, was my only point.
It reminds me of the internet filters at large companies. Keeps out the filth and bad actors at the detriment of being on a truly free internet. That makes sense when it's the companies computers.
Although I agree with you that is good that a big company did hit both walls at the same time, and that might benefit developers in the long term, It doesn't seem fair to compare Google's behavior and Apple's.
In the Android world, you still have an option. The option isn't good, you might end up limited, the user have to enable a scary checkbox, but you have an option. If Epic wants, they can create a micro store for android. The same thing they do with PCs today.
But you can't do it with an apple device. You have no option, no workaround. That's the monopoly that needs to be destroyed.
Even if both companies behaviors are detrimental for developers, Apple is way, way worst.
That all said: Sadly, this is not about freedom but about money. My bet is that Apply will lose the restrictions for Epic and they will drop the case.
>My bet is that Apply will lose the restrictions for Epic and they will drop the case.
They will have to do it for all dev's. Not just the big house name brands.
This is probably going to fundamentally change the landscape. Congress accused the big players including Apple of anti consumer behavior. Not being in control of your own device (Read: not being able to side load software without paying a fee.) will be the downfall of the app store.
> If there were actual competitors, their rates would be much lower... around 2-5% probably
Maybe for the more expensive apps, but not for the $0.99 apps that consumers love. For those, 2-5% doesn't come anywhere near covering the credit card processing costs.
this has a pretty trivial workaround, get in-store credits with a one-time payment and then keep paying the 1$ apps with that like any other store that has a wallet system/micro transactions.
I have an electric car charging account with chargepoint. They see how much usage you have and predictively fund your balance periodically.
When I first used it, I wouldn't use very much and I would get notices from time to time that $10 was added to my account. When my usage went up, they did $20 for a while, and at one point I hit $50.
I think this is reasonable and if it makes the overall cost of a service lower I am all for it.
Keep in mind that Apple is slugging developers $150 every year just to get their foot in the door of the App Store. That's not an insignificant sum.
No developer or company is happy with the way Apple runs the App Store. Their commission is outrageously high, their approval process is slow and often arbitrary, and their tooling is god-awful. We all just put up with it because the iPhone/iPad install base is so large, we don't really have a choice.
That being said, I'm very reluctant to demand regulation that interferes with a private company's right to run its own products. After all, maybe Apple's attitude is precisely why their install base is so large.
But God I wish there was a competitor that knocked them down the leaderboard a few pegs. Android is great, but the ecosystem is too fractured for the market to force Apple to change.
> As a general rule, the Regulation will cap interchange fees at 0.2% of the transaction value for consumer debit cards and at 0.3% for consumer credit cards.
1. What's the evidence to support a view that Apple and Google would charge 2-5%? Steam charges 30%. Epic takes 12%. Origin/EA takes 30%. Amazon takes an average 13% but it scales up to 25%.
2. Nobody gives a shit if this is better for developers, do they? Epic could charge +30% on IAP and use the Apple IAP system which is orders of magnitude better than anything else in the market. Developers set the pricing, and Apple handles security, authentication, refunds, etc. Consumers know it's a consistent experience across the platform.
3. The only benefit anyone seems to be able to come up with here is "choice" and a misguided belief that prices would come down as if by magic. Video game publishers took up to 60% of video game sales in physical stores, but the ARP of a video game has risen since 2008 and the advent of Steam and other online stores.
4. Seems like Apple has built a successful hardware/software play at least partially based on the fact that consumers don't have to do bullshit things like entering credit card details into some third party payment gateway to buy things, or deal with different refund policies from different folks. Consumers have flocked to the platform and now its success is being used as the basis of an attempt to strip it of its competitive advantage.
5. Same thing happened in the UK with sports coverage. The English Premier League was only broadcast on Sky until a few years ago. £29.99 a month got you all the live televised top flight soccer. Now to watch all of the televised soccer in the UK you need Sky Sports, Amazon Prime Video, and BT Sport. And Sky Sports prices have not decreased in real terms. (Oh, and BT's tech infrastructure is hot garbage.) I don't know anyone who loves the experience of having three different services to deal with and paying more money. Nobody is bleating about "choice" now.
6. I object to this on exactly the same terms as I object to Spotify's bitching that IAP margins -- which have been the same since before Spotify launched -- are too thin. They operate a business where they pay sixty cents of every dollar they make to rights holders for fuck's sake. Why are they bitching at Apple telling them that if they want to do a monthly subscription and net £9.99, they need to charge £14.28? Why can Spotify try to tell Apple that the HomePod -- a fucking speaker -- should let Spotify onto the device natively (when you can already connect via Bluetooth)?
7. Nearly every online store has serious arbitrary limitations placed on it by the operator of the store. Many of these are to do with the user experience, but many of them are a means of paying the bills for something they fund (hosting, marketing, app review team, developers working on APIs). It helps them sell phones, but it's intertwined with the user experience.
8. Gruber's point stands: if you think it's OK for Microsoft to prevent Sony from selling a PlayStation game streaming service on the Xbox Store, I don't see why you have an issue with this. It's not the same as Netflix: it's more like an app store within an app store.
I’d say the $.60 per dollar to rights holders is a much better deal than $.30 per dollar to Apple for payment processing. There are a lot of people involved in creating a song vs a couple automated API calls to process a monthly payment.
I think you are confusing the value you are getting from Apple with the means you are paying for it. Just because the fee is collected through a couple of payment API calls doesn’t mean thats what you are paying for.
> I'd say the $.60 per dollar to rights holders is a much better deal than $.30 per dollar to Apple for payment processing.
You're totally within your rights to think that! (My advice to you: don't start a business literally built on top of Apple's platform!)
> a couple automated API calls to process a monthly payment.
This sort of oversimplification makes it hard to take your argument seriously. I'm pretty sure you don't believe that, but just in case you do…
This article[1] suggests that Apple made $4.2bn from the App Store in the 10 years between 2008 and 2018.
Here are some of the things I would put into the cost lines for Apple's app store P&L (the company operates a combined P&L):
1. Multiple data centres dedicated to the app store and routing third-party notifications. That's both hosting of the apps and ongoing cost associated with e.g. push notifications, software updates. Each of these data centres has energy, staff, hardware costs. That is to say: there is both opex and capex here, which means Apple isn't only netting ongoing costs from revenue but also thinking about the cost of the capital invested in infrastructure up front.
2. The card processing charges associated with customers buying the app in the first place, and subsequent in-app purchases.
3. The cost of Apple's App Review Teams (three dedicated offices: Cork, Shanghai, Sunnyvale). That's 300 people.[2] There are costs behind them, too (for example: recruitment, HR, management).
4. Product and engineering costs associated with the team Apple has working on internal systems and services dedicated to app review.
5. An apportionment of costs associated with customers seeking technical support in-store and online due to third-party apps.
6. An apportionment of costs associated with the development and maintenance of services and APIs which Apple develops and makes available to app developers. (For example, sign-on with Apple.)
In 2018 the app store had seen 130 billion apps downloaded[3], with an average app size of 38mb[4]. That's 4.94 exabytes of data excluding updates.
Microsoft for many years charged Xbox developers for certification of games and patches, in part because of the bandwidth costs of distributing those patches to its customers, but also because providing this sort of service is mired by multiple perilous overheads -- which, I have to say, people on the web tend to misunderstand/ignore/dismiss.
Fortnite has nearly 150 million installs on iOS. It's 1.8 gigabytes. That's 270 million gigabytes, and the game is free. 30% of users don't spend a dime in Fortnite. That's 81 million gigabytes of free bandwidth for Epic, before you forget about the fact that Apple promotes the game etc.
Neither party is a saint here. Apple and Epic both get a lot of out the app being in the store. But Epic has multiple options to resolving this without trying to rob Apple's platform of a significant part of its USP.
There’s no way Epic has gotten $175 million dollars of value from Apples services let alone $175 million a year. Every single one of the popular apps would be better off dealing with all that infrastructure on their own IMO.
Installer infrastructure used to be nearly free. I absolutely disagree that Apple or Google are providing significant value here. The app discovery ship has sailed and no one is going to find your small apps on those platforms. The review processes might benefit users, but is a detriment for developers who aren’t guaranteed the ability to distribute apps they’ve invested in.
Steve Ballmer wasn’t stupid for laughing at the App Store. He just wildly underestimated the stupidity of the average developer. No one would have taken the App Store deal in the 90s and Apple would have been laughed out of the industry. Now everyone throws caution to the wind and marries into a system where they have no voice and no leverage. It’s absolutely crazy.
Yeah, but in the 90s it was physical distribution. Shelf space has value. Virtual shelf space is unlimited and has almost no value. A 60% cut would be a good deal if it guaranteed you visibility equal to being on the shelf in BestBuy. Plus, there were many retailers where you could sell your products and no one could literally prevent you from building your own store if you wanted to.
Imagine if Walmart was the ONLY retail store on the planet and took 30% of all revenue while selling their Great Value products in industries that have 30% margin (ex: music streaming).
It obviously has enough value for Fortnite that made almost a billion dollars after the 30% cut selling virtual costumes and skins - that really have no value.
> There's no way Epic has gotten $175 million dollars of value
This feels pretty subjective. My point was that you were suggesting the App Store is just a card processing gateway. It's significantly more than that.
> Installer infrastructure used to be nearly free.
And viruses and malware were everywhere, and many folks hated using their computers. People forget how far we've come since the days of malfunctioning and virus-riddled PCs being the butt of jokes.
> I absolutely disagree that Apple or Google are providing significant value here
Eh? App review? Literally a general purpose computing platform with close to zero malware / spyware? User satisfaction for iPhone amongst the highest for any consumer product in history.
> The review processes might benefit users
Ah. Yes. That's the core of this I think: Apple cares about Apple, then Apple customers, then developers. Developers seem to care most about developers. Customers seem to care most about customers.
> developers who aren't guaranteed the ability to distribute apps they've invested in
What? If your app conforms to the rules of Apple's app store, you are absolutely able to distribute the app.
> Steve Ballmer wasn't stupid for laughing at the App Store. He just wildly underestimated the stupidity of the average developer.
Tough gig to argue that every single app developer on the app store is stupid and you and Steve Ballmer are the smart ones.
> No one would have taken the App Store deal in the 90s
I want to write this in capital letters: every. Single. Consumer. Would. The app store is better for consumers. It's better to have one trustworthy company (Apple) with my credit card information. It's better to have a simple hardware-based authentication for payments like TouchID or FaceID. It's better to have no malware and spyware. It's better to have apps which don't crash or have showstopping bugs. It's better to have refunds controlled by one predictable entity. All of those things are made possible or significantly easier by the App Store.
> It's absolutely crazy
Crazy might look like dismissing all the huge benefits consumers love because one developer was unwilling to either accept the commission one of their marketplaces charges, or increase their prices to offset it.
Very solid analysis. And it doesn’t even cover payment fraud, support, and legal costs. I have friends involved with Xbox at Microsoft and they have to do an extraordinary amount of research for rights holders in older games when doing compatibility updates.
The really tragic part about this comment is the idea that what was needed was a "big, well funded company" to hit the duopoly.
The law exists that the strongest might not always get their way. Literally anyone hitting it /should/ have the same claims, rights, laws, and the same process as the very rich and strong when up against these enormous "legal persons". It's an ideal and we won't achieve perfection in trying to get there and there are tradeoffs with other ideals.
But let's never lose sight of the ideal of equality before the law and the strongest should not always get their way.
It's just so important. Without it, we end up with people as the enemy of the state with its monopoly on violent enforcement, then on to revolution and all that horror.
I think it's an ideal that is slightly more important than the desire and profit of google and apple claiming the right to tax success and profit as though they were nation-states and the welfare of other big, well-funded profitable companies that don't like that. Regulatory capture is a disaster and an even bigger one that it first appears, be you leftist, rightist, collectivist, rugged individualist or, more hopefully, someone not so easy to label who thinks about individual issues and wants an outcome approximating what you think is best for everyone. We're all united against corruption, I have no doubt, we only disagree on whether particular cases are or are not that. The unity opposed to corruption is a thing that gets lost quite often as the division are imposed on us.
2-5%? Where did you pull that number from? Credit card fees alone are 2-3%, and besides payment processing Apple/Google obviously has other costs (at the least distribution).
Let’s not forget, you can frame this as a “cost” to developers, but it can just as easily be framed as a convenience fee to consumers, I as a consumer am happy to pay it.
It’s astonishing how the most people here look at this whole situation just from the perspective of a developer and mostly tune out the implications for society and consumers. Case in point: You discount the value of security compared to delivery which is ridiculous. Apple does a much better job at the former and look at the societal outcomes. The value generated by a relatively safe computing platform is ENORMOUS. Even a developer should be able to acknowledge as much.
I agree that fees seem somewhat high but we might be underestimating the cost it takes to check all the apps. One reasonable change of law could be a requirement for cost and revenue transparency for app stores and if we are hell bent on lowering prices maybe even a stipulation that margins must remain reasonable or even that stores must be run by a separate nonprofit with its own goals and guidelines.
However, all of this seems to be more in the realm of congress and law making rather than the courts. I don’t think that there are many good legal grounds for epic here. Everyone is paying... they can’t really claim damages in a competitive market sense as they are not worse of than any competitor.
I don't think Epic Games is doing this to get the rates for the whole market down. They're just looking to get their tax cut reduced and increase profits. Once its down, they won't even look at indie developers and smaller firms.
> If there were actual competitors, their rates would be much lower... around 2-5% probably.
You can only get nothing for 2-5% because that barely meets the payment processing fees (of course, a large company can negotiate a lower rate). If you’re saying 2-5% plus payment processing fees, then that might be possible depending on the solution and what’s provided to users and developers.
A lot of people are giving Epic a hard time for this, but I think it takes quite a bit of gusto to disrupt such an insane moneymaker in order to rally its userbase against these anti-competitive practices.
I imagine both of them and Apple (and possibly Google) have.
Well we don’t know for sure there’s a very good chance the negotiations have been going on behind the scenes and they finally broke down far enough that Epic decided to pull the trigger and force the issue.
Apple and Google also being prepared doesn't mean much for the final outcome of the case.
Even if Apple and Google have wargamed the move and found out they would definitely lose, would they do anything without first being confronted? I'd bet they wouldn't, because that would be several hundreds of millions in lost revenue. It's better for them to stay quiet, perhaps try to appease under the table those who have deep enough pockets to challenge them (e.g. Amazon), keep milking the cow for as long as possible.
I agree with what you said, but I think you might not have the scale right it's not hundreds of millions of lost revenue, it's many BILLIONS.
In 2019, the App Store had a gross revenue of 54 billion. Apple's cut should be 30% of that, or 16.2 billion.
Multiply that over several decades, and also consider that gross revenue of the App Store is growing at around 10% per year - we are talking about over 200 billion of revenue for Apple over the next decade, minimum.
If this gambit doesn't pan out, they can just return to the status quo, it's not like Apple would ever permanently ban them, nor would they even reneg on the 30%.
So the only loss is the time they're off the store, plus legal. They just need to get this lawsuit started, maybe lose a couple weeks profits from the iOS store, and they've created the possibility of permanently increasing profits by 20%.
They reduced prices on all platforms though. And iOS users aren't 100% of Fortnite purchasers. I haven't yet found a good source but from [0] which says ~$300mm/mo total and ~$30mm/mo iOS it's 10% (higher than I expected tbh). So they lose 100% of iOS revenue and 20% of PC and console revenue from this.
If Epic wins and are allowed to offer alternate IAP for 20% discount, that increase profits for Fortnite on iOS by 10%, but all the other Fortnite platforms lose 20%.
Maybe Epic will raise the virtual prices of Fortnite goods over time to make up for it, eg a skin will be 1500 vbucks instead of 1250. But I'm guessing Epic has larger ambitions, such as making V-bucks systems for all games that use Unreal Engine.
You can bet on it that this is part of a larger game of chess. Certainly not the rebellious resistance fight of an underdog, as it is mostly being presented.
More like cannibalization between several large and ruthless corporations, and mostly because those who should have protected this market from being cornered into its current corrupt state, miserably failed at that (time and again).
Many may be hopeful about the results of this move, which is no doubt part of Epic's strategy. However, I expect that the results will mostly just favor the bottom line of whoever wins this fight. I'm rather convinced that it won't be much of an improvement for end users.
Maybe end users will benefit for a short while after a victory by Epic, until the company decides to "cash in" on their win and end users will (again) get pretty much what they had up till now. Because that is apparently what Epic can charge its users.
There was a lot of debate on whether or not Apple should allow third-party app stores/easily sideloaded apps, which really shouldn't be the debate since Epic already had Fortnite on Android via a third-party launcher and went to the Play store anyways.
The debate needs to be on whether or not they should take a cut on in-app purchases, and/or what that cut should be, and/or if they should allow third-party processors where the store owner doesn't see profit.
Twitter has Apple fans rushing to criticize Epic. I'm absolutely flabbergasted the freedom disruption blinders are so strong.
Why anyone supports Apple is a mystery to me. What if the web forced you to use Apple Payments? What if Microsoft forced all installs to go through the Microsoft Store?
Apple took focus from the web and then extinguished openness. It's tyranny.
Apple recently rolled out "Sign-In With Apple", which creates burner e-mail address that you can seamlessly use with 3rd party services. As a privacy-conscious consumer, this was great! On top of that, Apple forced all of its developers to support "Sign-In With Apple". This is one of the many reasons I continue to use Apple's phone and OS, because it gives me some peace of mind.
Apple Payments, similarly, gives me some financial peace of mind by providing me with one centralized place where I can view and cancel my subscriptions/purchases. I can't tell you how many times I've forgotten to unsubscribe from a service that I don't use. With Apple's in-app payments system, I can keep tabs on everything. It's like a user-friendly financial reconciliation layer.
Both of these Apple services place some amount of burden on the developer, and I'd even argue that the first example was pretty broadly celebrated by privacy-minded HN readers. The strongest devil's advocate argument is that the second example provides the same value to Apple customers, and that's a distinguishing feature of its platform that it ought to be able to maintain.
There's a strong argument to be made that one ought to be able to side-load apps and install competing app stores on their iPhones (I tend to agree), but that's somewhat orthogonal to this particular issue, especially considering the Google Play Store action.
> Apple recently rolled out "Sign-In With Apple", which creates burner e-mail address that you can seamlessly use with 3rd party services. As a privacy-conscious consumer, this was great!
Apple spins this as privacy, but it's really a salvo they fired against other companies. Notably Google and Facebook. Apple seeks to weaponize its userbase in the war over attention.
Apple wins by inserting themselves as middleman into every transaction they can.
A "Sign in With Apple" user isn't your customer anymore.
If you think they value privacy, you should consider the telemetry they collect on you and the conversations they record.
> A "Sign in With Apple" user isn't your customer anymore. Apple inserted themselves as middleman yet again.
Yes, as a customer, I don't wish to provide my email / identity with every service I use. If it takes Apple being the "middleman" to have the power to control how a business interacts with me as a customer, then so be it.
> If you think they value privacy, you should consider the telemetry they collect on you and the conversations they record.
I used to work at Apple on their services team, and I can tell you right now that Apple has virtually no useful telemetry information that can be tied to an individual user. iOS telemetry data is tied to a periodically recycling identifier that's un-correlated with your iCloud identity.
> If it takes Apple being the "middleman" to have the power
...that works right up until Apple bans you, or one of your favorite services, or just demands you pony up 30% of all the money you spend online.
You think that's unlikely? In the 80s, Microsoft was the hero and IBM was the villain. In the late 90s and early 2000s, Google was everyone's favorite. During the Arab Spring, Facebook was a popular tool for liberation.
Every corporation will become evil if it becomes successful enough. Give Apple centralized control over web authentication and they'll be just as ruthless as they are with the app store. We're watching a shift in public perception happen right now.
The only long-term defense we have is decentralizataion, and you're fighting that. Why? So you won't get spam that you never see?
Dude, maybe cool down a little. I understand you feel really strongly about this, but there's no need for personal attacks. We're all dealing with the implications of this, and there are pros and cons on both sides. This is a nuanced issue.
And if you'll excuse some unsolicited feedback, your arguments will bear way more weight if you do away with the histrionics.
It wasn't a personal attack, unless "They worked at Apple and probably have a different perception" is a personal attack.
I don't harbor any ill will against you. Characterizing my words that way is disingenuous.
> This is a nuanced issue.
From my perspective, it's black and white. Apple is clearly taking advantage of market forces and is hurting small players.
> your arguments will bear way more weight if you do away with the histrionics.
The arguments that are heard are the ones that engender empathy. We've been at the point of logical discussion for years, and that hasn't gotten us anywhere. Now the outrage has come to a boil, and I won't censor myself or pretend this is a friendly game of sports.
Apple is a trillion dollar vampire. I'm letting my representatives know that.
You're probably on the wrong forum, then. Either that or you'll have to understand that not everybody sees this as black and white, and maybe understand exactly why.
> Apple is a trillion dollar vampire. I'm letting my representatives know that.
> ...that works right up until Apple bans you, or one of your favorite services, or just demands you pony up 30% of all the money you spend online.
Another commenter framed it well: that Apple behaves both as a consumer union as well as a protection racket, sometimes hiding behind the former in pursuit of the latter. It's definitely worth questioning if 30% is a fair transaction fee, but OTOH that's how much every app store charges in the market today, including Epic's very own.
> You think that's unlikely? In the 80s, Microsoft was the hero and IBM was the villain. In the late 90s and early 2000s, Google was everyone's favorite. During the Arab Spring, Facebook was a popular tool for liberation.
Yes, and IBM eventually withered away into irrelevance and Microsoft hasn't created a business with dominant market share since Office. Facebook still is a tool for liberation, just for the "wrong" people, and Google still provides a robust Search and Maps product. One day, both of those companies might find themselves no longer the dominant player — just like DEC, IBM, and Microsoft.
> The only long-term defense we have is decentralizataion, and you're fighting that. Why? So you won't get spam that you never see?
I understand that, decentralization has a lot of merit — it's what affords us the option to not use Apple at all and have nothing to do with its walled garden. We still have the option to not use Apple today. The day this stops being true is the day that we all have to worry.
Epic Games Store charges 12%, not 30%. This would probably not be nearly as big a concern if Apple charged 12%.
There are many people in this world who think they would pay a steep social penalty if they switched away from iPhones. Now part of me just wants to blame them for having shallow friends or whatever, but I try and keep that part of me in check.
> There are many people in this world who think they would pay a steep social penalty if they switched away from iPhones.
Yeah, but to suggest that you don't have the option to switch away from Apple just because you might have friends that don't like using anything except for iMessage is a real stretch. You don't have to be a part of shallow iMessage groups, any more than you have to be a part of Instagram. They're both frivolities.
I like Apple. I kind of prefer everyone being forced to use Apple payments for convenience and safety. But they shouldn’t get 30%. Something closer to CC processing fees like 3 or 5% seems fair.
I’m not a fan of alternate app stores.
But I’m happy to see someone force this issue. So we can stop dancing around it and settle things.
I think there are basically two ways to look at Apple's App Store policies:
1. Apple acts like a sort of consumer union, coordinating behavior of a massive and lucrative audience so that apps have to meet certain minimum standards to reach it.
2. Apple acts like a protection racket, extracting a piece of the consumer surplus because they can.
It seems that you like the benefits of #1, and I agree with you. The problem is that in the Fortnite case, it appears to be a case of #2 posturing as #1. Does anyone truly believe that Fortnite players are better off paying 30% more to Apple?
This is a good framework. One way to merge these views is with a graduated take rate. So Apple might take 30% of the first $10mm, 20% of the next $10mm and $10% thereafter.
Apple Pay does not take 30% cuts, it's just a payment method. And it's by far the best purchasing experience on the web, IMO. When a vendor implements Apple Pay, I end up at least twice as likely to buy from them because so much friction is removed. (Luckily Shopify makes it easy for people so most small, boutique storefronts will support it.)
So anyone who doesn’t think it’s as much a slam-dunk as everyone high-fiving each other thinks is automatically an apologist?
I’d love to have the option to sideload apps on my iPhone. I understood that I couldn’t do this when I bought it however, and don’t really see any compelling arguments as to why Apple would lose - there seem to be many, many arguments based on fuzzy-feelings like “I don’t like it” and “I feel 30% is too high” and “but it’s morally wrong” and “well if you imagine it this way it’s really a monopoly” and “no, I have decided that arbitrarily this would only apply to ‘general purpose’ devices”, none of which sound like legal arguments.
I assume Epic is putting this up to lose in order to gamble that the law is changed in response to that suit, in which case they’d be fighting presumably against at least the lobby power of Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo and many other interests.
> I’d love to have the option to sideload apps on my iPhone.
As would developers.
Computing used to be free as in speech. You could host an `.exe` file on your website and point customers there to download it.
Now most people use phones and >50% of Americans are out of your reach.
Don't claim that security sandboxing, privacy, and protecting users is why this has been done. With the appropriate design, users can be protected and the freedom to compute can remain.
Don't push the blame on the web not being a sufficiently native platform. Cross-platform APIs could have been built. It would have saved centuries of human effort writing both Android and iPhone apps. Think of all the human innovation capital wasted. Maybe some of these people could have been solving cancer instead.
Don't compare this to Nintendo. If I write a video game in C++, I can distribute it on PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, Android, iPhone, Steam, and on my website. Most gamers own more than one of these platforms at a time, making it easier to reach them, but they tend to have only one type of phone. Additionally, Nintendo is not a general purpose computer. I don't do dating, online banking, taxes, or groceries on the Switch. We don't hand out Switches to school children.
The App Store's unhealthy product placements and ratings led to a race to the bottom. Apps are $0.99 with a lifetime of free updates. And Apple takes a 30% cut. They dehumanize engineers and small businesses.
In a time of pestilence and famine, Apple's grain silos are overflowing. Yet they take from the mouths of the very people that helped build their platform with back-breaking and thankless effort.
I agree that things used to be different, but, not usually better. apps used to be malware a lot more on desktops, no sites had great reliability records, and the OSes and devices were slow, heavy, and un optimized.
Sure, phones are not desktops of 2001, but for many people that is a good thing. In fact, despite several attempts by different companies to create open phones, most people Demonstrate that they would rather buy and use closed ones. If you want true open OS on your phone, you probably have a niche desire.
Personally, I would rather the App Store be more selective on whether apps really worked or not. More open certainly has appeal, but more low quality apps to wade through doesn’t appeal much.
I've brought lots of Apple devices, I knew what I was getting each time, and that's exactly what I wanted. I want Apple to review the applications it distributes to my phone, I want to have a very simple and centralized way to manage app subscriptions, I want strictly controlled app permissions, I want to be able to buy an iPhone for my Grandma and know she'll be pretty safe installing apps on it, I want to trust that I can properly apply security controls to the phones my company distributes to it's employees. Those are all value adds to me, they all cost money, and I'm more than happy to pay for them.
It's a walled garden, and that's what I intentionally purchased when I brought my devices. These software developers and service providers have a presumption that my money is simply there for the taking, but if they want to get it, they have to come to me, and I have very intentionally chose the platform I want to use. If their services were so important to me, then they could just withdraw them from the appstore, and I would obviously have to go out and buy a different device.
It's one thing to be a walled garden, it's another to be a walled garden and forbid all other walled gardens. Will you be okay with it if Apple provides the only walled garden for the entire world?
In general, I think free-form app distribution should be the way to go for any device under the general-purpose computer category. Multiple walled gardens can be spawned on top of that.
Apple doesn’t provide the only walled garden in the world. It targets a very specific high end segment, it faces very robust competition, there is no plausible way it could end up gaining a monopoly position in the market, and there is no evidence that they’re trying to do that. So yes, if the reality of the situation was completely different, I might have a different opinion. But it is not, so I don’t.
> In general, I think free-form app distribution should be the way to go for any device under the general-purpose computer category.
Then launch a company, provide that to the market, and see if that’s something consumers want. There are already plenty of companies that provide that though, so you might struggle to compete.
General purpose computing is also not a legal category of product, nor is it really what you’re making it out to be. Playstations, Xboxes and my car stereo are all general purpose computers. The issue isn’t whether the device in question is a general purpose computer, or an embedded system. It’s whether a company is allowed to create an operating system where they can control what software is distributed to it. As iOS does not have a monopoly, I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be up to consumers as to whether it exists or not. Personally, as a consumer, Apple make a phone that I want to use, and part of the value I see in it is their control over app distribution.
> Playstations, Xboxes and my car stereo are all general purpose computers.
My argument is that they are not. I know certain individuals have likened them to general-purpose computers due to the underlying processors getting more and more like desktops'. But the majority of users do not use them as general-purpose computers. So I actually used the term to differentiate smartphones from things like video game consoles.
Even though I still stand by my support for free-form app distribution, I understand that from a consumer perspective, Apple's current practices may not tip the scale between good and bad. (And as a developer, I also do not want to submit my apps to 10 different stores neither)
But at the very least, I hope Apple can (eventually) improvement their one-size-fits-all pricing model and payment methods. They need to provide devs with more flexible ways of rolling out app updates, and give price cuts to apps that barely use any Apple resources.
Then I’d suggest you come up with a different term to use, because the phrase ‘general purpose computer’ has been in use since at least the 1940s as far as I know, and it’s definition is quite different from yours.
I think the meaning you’re trying to use is that a PlayStation only runs PlayStation games/apps, that only Sony gets to decide what PlayStation games/apps are released, and that the users know this when they buy one? Therefore customers know that they can’t run arbitrary software on it when they purchase one? Because that’s exactly true for the Apple App Store as well. Customers are well aware of the limitations of the system, and it is used by Apple as a differentiating factor in their marketing.
> Even though I still stand by my support for free-form app distribution, I understand that from a consumer perspective, Apple's current practices may not tip the scale between good and bad.
But such channels are already open to you as both a developer and a customer. Furthermore, those channels have a majority market share. Why is it necessary for all platforms to suit your preferences?
> But at the very least, I hope Apple can (eventually) improvement their one-size-fits-all pricing model and payment methods.
I would agree. It is something they have already been improving over time though. I’ve had plenty of run ins with App Store rules myself, and I hope they continue to improve. But I also really hope the App Store is something they keep putting effort into, because even with the cut, it’s an absurdly valuable sales channel. I personally quite grateful that Apple have collected such a large amount of high spending customers for me to market to.
I think there's a lot more Apple users who seem to think that just because Apple doesn't have a majority of market share of users that they're not monopolistic. This of course is rubbish as the iOS store's revenue dwarfs the Google Play store, and as such any decisions they make are disproportionately impactful to any and all app developers.
There's another category, that I find even more annoying. It's the people who claim that because it is in the TOS, Apple is 100% right and their actions justified. The absence of a personal moral compass and the reliance on some TOS to tell right from wrong is alarming. What happened to "Apple may win this because of the TOS, but I don't find it right, and it shouldn't be allowed"?
Bully for them if they win, I'm just not sure why I'm supposed to be taking sides in this fight. It's not exactly David and Goliath, at least as far as I can see.
Tim Sweeney was outspoken about Microsoft’s attempt to force their “App Store” down windows users throats. Microsoft backed down, has certainly moved in a more developer friendly direction, and arguably may have saved their own asses in the process.
For everyone defending Apple, consider your main desktop/laptop computer and how you would feel if all of the apps you installed not only had to be downloaded from Apple/Dell/Lenovo/Microsoft but also 30% of any software or subscriptions you bought on that device went to one of those companies. Apple sells devices with high margins on top of all of this. Which is probably why they are the most valuable public company in the world besides maybe Saudi Aramco.
I never got into mobile development because I didn’t think there was any way Apple’s App Store would survive asking for a 30% cut and final say on distribution. And now it’s way worse than it was in the beginning. There’s way less upside for small developers and a lot more risk of being rejected IMO.
A bunch of pissed off gamers harassing judges is more liable to backfire than anything else, if the goal is to rally the base.
As far as politics goes, you can forget about it in America at least. The senate can’t figure out how to deal with the economic fallout from this pandemic; the idea that they’d be able to pass a law on this is genuinely laughable.
This is also bad, but Google still allows Android users to install Epic's game store (which does continue to list Fortnite), so I think it's a bit more defensible than Apple's ban in which it's now just impossible to install the game at all. Removing from the Play Store on Android isn't equivalent to removing from the App Store on iOS; you can install apps from outside of the Play Store on Android, but you can't install apps from outside of the App Store on iOS (at least, not without jailbreaking).
Epic already tried to make a run of it outside the Play Store, and gave up, citing Google's efforts to "outright block software obtained outside the Google Play store." I don't think there's a practical difference here.
If I go to fortnite.com/android, I can still download and install the Epic Game Store for Android. So it's definitely better than the situation on iOS. In practice, you can still install Fortnite on Android (and it's only a Google search away — when I searched "fortnite android" just now, it was the top hit of the search results, just after the News section that's filled with the news of the Play Store ban); you can't install Fortnite on iOS at all.
It's actually even slightly easier to install APKs on Android than installing non-Mac-App-Store software on macOS — with Android it prompts you right when you open to allow or disallow installs from the source you downloaded from, whereas macOS makes you dig around in Settings the first time. I tried installing the Epic store just now on Android, and it was a fairly seamless experience.
I'm sure it gets fewer sales, since the Play store is bundled with most Android phones and the Epic store isn't. But it's pretty different than an outright ban: the Play store is charging you the 30% Google tax for reach/audience, but you're free to list on an alternative store if you choose to.
I'm sure they weighed that against setting a precedent that developers can sidestep their 30% cut. The income was probably considered more valuable than the PR.
> I'm sure they weighed that against setting a precedent that developers can sidestep their 30% cut
That precedent is being set anyway, the Epic Games store still exists on Android, and you can get Fortnite through it, and this dispute can't do anything but bring more attention to that fact.
Of course, that kind of does show a way in which they are better for devs and consumers than Apple, since dispute over store terms with devs are less of a total barrier to delivering/selling (for devs) or getting access to (for consumers) apps on the platform.
I had been trying to remember the name of this game for over a year now, my few Google searches for "long term space strategy mmo" never yielded anything. I love that hackernews seems to dredge up the interesting parts of the net.
Anyways, Neptune's Pride is very very fun and I can't wait to play it again!
It's important to remember that Epic games isn't a champion of freedom here.
After Epic store launched on the PC in 2018, Epic used their platform's growing popularity to bait and/or strong arm (it's unclear to me) indie developers into exclusivity contracts on Epic's game store. This action caused a massive uproar in the gaming community because with those exclusivity deals, Epic made developers break existing preorders.
This isn't about freedom or choice or walled gardens. It's about cutting off a slightly bigger slice of a billion dollar pie.
Do you really consider giving developers a giant bag of guaranteed money up front to be strong arming them?
They took the deal, they didn't get their life/safety threatened.
There was some really shitty behavior by developers who took the pot of money who had already made promises to crowdfunders previously. That's on the developer though, and they should be judged appropriately for their actions.
No, I do not consider that to be strong arming. I consider that to be baiting.
As my post says: it's unclear to me which tactic was used with which developers, or how those contracts influenced the promises developers made to preorder customers.
We don't know mostly because those contracts are secret.
Sure, we don't know all the details but we do know this:
The developers agreed to the deal. If that meant they had to do something shitty (Like not-provide steam keys to backers who paid for that during a crowdfunding campaign), you should be upset with the developers. They made a promise and then they went back on it.
I don't think it's fair to hold Epic's feet to the fire because a developer took the money. If someone offers you a lot of money to break a promise (and you take it), this is a reflection of your character.
Epic didn't make anyone do anything. They made the choice.
I think this is an age old question that's been discussed thoroughly.
If somebody offers you a lot of money to do something immoral, and you chose to accept it that makes YOU immoral. It also should cast a shadow on the person offering you the deal because they too know what they are asking of you is immoral.
I don't think anyone in this deal is acting in the best interest of users. Some of these options may be better than others for indie devs.
I think you still have to clarify what makes baiting bad here. If I hold a sale in my retail store, is that baiting? Is that bad? I don't think so.
In this scenario, much of the uproar that happened was developers breaking promises, and the blame for that being placed on Epic as well. Epic merely offered better deals(in the form of a better revenue split) and cash offers to developers that are notorious for being poorly funded. I don't see how this is a bad thing.
In fact, I'd make the argument that there being more competition in the PC video game marketplace is a good thing that will benefit the consumer.
There has been no strong arming whatsoever. If you believe there was, then provide any hint of proof of it.
There have been good deals for developpers, and good deals that developper shouldn't have taken but still took despite their previous engagements to their funders, but Epic literally had no position to strong arm anyone into anything, and they didn't bait anyone - no one signed then realized "oh damn, I didn't think money for exclusivity meant money for exclusivity !".
Epic just said "hey look at this bag of money, I give it to you if you put your game here".
One of the non negotiable condition to get the pile of money was to not publish the game on steam, removing it if it was already there and cancelling preorders. That's not exactly friendly to developers, forbidden to publish to the other platform with more customers.
It's about Epic's freedom and choice. Hopefully this leads to widespread developer freedom. You're looking for a "perfect victim", but it's impossible to find those, especially perfect victims who have the financial resources to fight Apple and Google.
If this were just about money, it would be totally irrational. Epic does have money to gain if they're successful, but they have a lot more money to lose if they fail. It's kind of a suicide mission to simultaneously take on two of the most powerful corporations on Earth. No rational purely profit-seeking corporation would follow this strategy.
Epic was fighting the Valve Steam digital store monopoly. Fact is that Epic in the process of cutting off a bigger slice of pie for themselves would be giving consumers more choice while breaking up anti consumer monopoly.
By strong-arm, you mean by offering them money? I'd call that fair competition. You can't run an entertainment service without exclusive content: Sony knows it, Nintendo knows it, Netflix knows it, and Epic knows it. And Valve knows it, by the way—try to install Portal 2 without installing Steam.
Steam needed that competition. Valve's 30% cut of sales is ludicrous considering that they do not manually audit, validate, or curate the software on their store. They don't even handle security properly—there have been multiple instances of Valve ignoring vulnerabilities in Steam.
I think Epic and Tim Sweeney have acted with remarkable consistency.
I happen to know some first-time indie devs that were given this deal. The deal is incredibly generous. Basically, epic offered them a bag of money in exchange for a certain period of partial exclusivity (basically "don't be on Steam"). That's it. This bag of money allowed the developers to:
- Grow the dev team enough to accelerate time to launch--QA extra engineers, heck, the devs even used the money to pay for porting the game to other devices!
- Guarantee that they could continue to fund development of the game after launch. Bugfixes, DLC, etc.
- Have enough left over to "try again" and launch a sophomore game regardless of the performance of this one.
You'd think that fans of indie games would love this. Who could possibly be opposed to having an indie dev get funds that would enable them to graduate to managing a small indie game studio instead of a ramen diet & 20 hour work days in the living room.
And yet they got enormous amounts of hate from so-called indie game fans and members of the gaming community. And yes, the devs were aware that the hate was coming from a disproportionately small number of people and that most people don't actually care at all. But still, the psychological toll of having to deal with the harassment was enough to make them strongly consider not taking the money--even though it was the right thing to do both from a financial pov and from a development pov (because it would guarantee they could finish and support the game).
The crazy thing is that even if you hate epic you should love these deals: cheer for your favorite dev, then wait a year and buy the game on Steam, doubly sticking it to the man.
Some of the vitriol stems from the specific manner in which they set up their exclusivity deals. In multiple cases they set up deals with studios who had previously advertised or sold keys to other platforms such that customers found their purchases retroactively bound to Epic. I personally found their PR around these cases to be patronizing, and it left a bad taste in my mouth regarding Epic.
Exclusives on consoles suck, but the Epic store has been a huge win for developers and gamers. Bags of money, more choice, and competition and the only downside is needing to install an extra launcher. Yes please!
This is total bullshit. There is no evidence of any strong-arming. It's the usual Internet storm in a teacup from 'gamers'. They offered exclusivity monetary incentives.
$20 to a charity of your choice if you show affirmative proof of (within 7 days¹) a contract showing strong-arming². Email is in profile if I don't notice HN reply. When you make your comment showing strong-arming, I will make two comments one saying "this is strong-arming" and one saying "this is not" and we can see what the community votes up.
If there are at least 5 votes and the former wins, you get to pick the charity. Otherwise, it goes to AMF.
¹ just so that there is a day the money goes out. If you need more time, just say so.
² Email is in profile, you can set up a call with me or send me an email of the contract if you don't want to share the contract publicly.
My own view is that "They offered exclusivity monetary incentives." should be completely illegal.
Everyone should get the same rates with no lock in or out. In media terms if Netflix can stream a movie for $0.40 per stream then every other provider should be able to stream it under the same terms.
Exclusivity agreements are anti-competitive. We've seen them grow unchecked and it's created the same unhealthy relationship between distributors and creators that lead to the forced sale of movie theaters away from the movie studios.
I have no problem with villains fighting other villains.
Epic Games is obviously just out to profit more. But this is a war that we all benefit from if they win.
Sure I'd love to see someone like the EFF change this. But the reality is they don't have the funding to go directly against Apple and Google on this. Epic Games does.
Anyone who tries to justify epic buying exclusives is a fool IMO.
Tim isn't doing it for developers or publishers, he wants a piece of the steam pie.
If he was serious about being competition he would come out with a better platform and compete.
When MS came out the windows store, Tim said "they’re trying to force this thing on the industry and it’s woefully inadequate for the tasks they’re trying to serve it for"
Yet, the epic store, was... IS STILL woefully inadequate. They built a terrible store that has no functionality, no currency options, no linux support, nothing more than a front for a dozen games. Then turn around and buy exclusives under the disguise of "we're doing it for developers and publishers, we are the good guys, screw all you gamers out there who don't care!!!"
(I'm aware they have tried to fill some of these features, but they have ALONG way to go)
They could have come out with something better, and been competition, but they have nothing to compete with.
----
Tim also said: "I believe Microsoft has every right to operate a PC app store, and to curate it how they choose."
Tim is now: "Oh Apple and Google shouldn't be allowed to run their own app store how they choose."
IMO, this was Epic's one misstep—they should have pulled Fortnite from the Google Play Store a week before this stunt. Apple is the big fish (revenue-wise) with the most draconian policy. Provoking two giants at once was not necessary.
Every other aspect of how Epic played this has been brilliant IMO.
Of course you can when you break the terms of services. Try adding some porn to your game and see it gone from both stores in a day as well. Or some other way to obvious break their terms.
But the protest works is they're doing something which ought to be allowed. If Epic got pulled from the App Store for suddenly showing pornography, I don't think they'd get much sympathy.
I really don't see how Epic has a leg to stand on here, not on a platform which allows sideloading. The Apple case is complicated, but this seems like a straightforward violation of an entirely voluntary contract.
Doubtful. Android can be customized by the OEMs and many do provide alternate stores preloaded. They'd have to go after Pixel phones (not a massive market share) or after the requirement to use Play services to be in the store.
This is going to backfire for Epic. I see both sides, however, the App Stores have overhead to support free apps, and they need to be compensated.
If a software developer has an issue with the distribution channel, then they can make their own, including the R&D and operate expense for the hardware. I know, really unpopular take. Bigger question is are Apple and Google (with hardware/software ecosystems) deserving of Bell-style regulation? The US already has a playbook for this.
there is no monopoly - there are two primary choices(coke and pepsi), both with the similar constraints.
You can choose RC cola or Faygo - always an option. Maybe Faygo offers a great new flavor(no payment fees) and tons of Users see that benefit outweighing other features? That's the market. Make the compelling value prop and you win.
According to another comment here, Epic paid Apple over $360 Million dollars in the last twelve months. I'm pretty sure Apple's overhead isn't so high that they need to charge that much money for just one application.
Epic already has a distribution channel, payment processing, the whole 9 yards, what they don't have is anyway onto the hardware that you own.
The amount paid to Apple is not a factor - it's what the agreement was. If that 360 MM is 30%, then we can also say I doubt Epic has over a billion in overhead. I do not believe the point is valid.
Epic does have a way onto the phones: provide an easy way for User's to jailbreak them as part of the ingress to the Epic distribution channel.
"In 2010 and 2012, the U.S. Copyright Office approved exemptions that allowed smartphone users to jailbreak their devices legally,[62] and in 2015 the Copyright Office approved an expanded exemption that also covers other all-purpose mobile computing devices, such as tablets"
So all Epic needs to do is assume the cost and investment of managing the inter-dependencies of the hardware with various other pieces of software, including their distribution channel.
With respect, it's not our call to criticize the amount. If we as a community care that much we can create and adopt alternate means, or choose not to use their technology.
the 1984 ad is a little strange TBH. Apple was saying IBM wants to control the future of all information in this country, so come join us instead. Epic is saying, we want more money so standby while we go to court. Where is the epic smart phone alternative which is going to save us from the apple monopoly?
It will be better for all developers if the gatekeepers lower their rates, but epic really doesn't strike me as a white knight here.
The problem is that app stores are charging 30%. More Operating Systems and competition would be good, but it's not going to fix the problem. After all, Steam takes a 30% cut, and they've got a client for multiple desktop operating sytems, as well as numerous stores competing against them (Windows Store, Mac Store, Itch.io, GoG, Humble, Greenman gaming, tons more). Normal people are just not going to install another operating system on their phone, or app store for that matter.
Apple or Google may cave in this particular case because Epic has some leverage with their userbase, but I'd be shocked to see either of them lower the rates for anyone other than Epic. I think it's going to take legislation to fix this.
It's a fair enough point.
However, I think that the truth is that intrinsically you can't find a player with enough resources and weight to throw around and force the issue, who isn't also a self-interested money-hungry corporate bully when the occasion suits them.
The app store is a two way street. For most developers, apple can hide behind "no one's forcing you to be on our app store". And they are right, apple doesn't have a monopoly, but they have a lot of users, and what they really have is a lot of users who spend money on their platform. They have the customers you want.
But there is the flip side, which is that apple needs apps to be in the store, and sometimes needs specific ones. For most companies, apple doesn't need your app. The only parties that stand a chance at making waves are those who do control apps apple can't do without, e.g. "what do you mean I can't get Fortnite on my iPhone?"
No one in the situation is gonna be perfect, because at the end of the day, this is a fight for who provides what value and should get what money. It's sort of a Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla situation.
Good for Epic to open this new battle front against Apple (and it seems Google).
As I wrote in the Apple thread: I think Epic are the ideal entity to do this since - so long as Apple or Google won't actively erase apps from people devices - they already have large install base and it's unlikely to grow much more.
Those who managed to install the latest update are already able to use epic "apple/google tax"less payment system so that protects their revenue for a while.
If either of those para-monopolies start erasing apps from people's phone's that would only add to the narrative that Epic, Spotify, EU et al. are already pushing: these two entities have built a global extractive platform that keeps partners and consumers hostage by their fees.
It may not just be for a lawsuit. They may provide fuel for a change of law, as Congress bumbles through an attempt at anti-trust enforcement, maybe they can become a test case for lawmakers looking for loss of competition and consumer choice. (Although existing lobbying dollars from Google, Apple, Facebook, & company may be effective in holding back representatives. Money in hand, in election season no less.)
Epic Games can show just how much the on-going appstore tax prevent new business models from taking hold. They shown an incredible ability to entice people to separate from their money, even convinced Disney?! to partner for branded content.
Alongside Epic Games licensing of the Unreal Engine at-or-below cost (12% [1]), I believe Sweeney's commitment to growing a "Metaverse" market at the expense of Epic's short-term profit.
This comes alongside EPIC(.org)'s comparisons about American vs Chinese & emerging markets competitiveness, linked today [2].
Isn't Congress on summer vacation and then they'll all be fighting for reelection anyway? I hardly doubt anything will get passed until next year if it's not important enough to get a bipartisan vote.
The Google statement really feels like they're subtweeting Apple:
> The open Android ecosystem lets developers distribute apps through multiple app stores. For game developers who choose to use the Play Store, we have consistent policies that are fair to developers and keep the store safe for users. While Fortnite remains available on Android, we can no longer make it available on Play because it violates our policies. However, we welcome the opportunity to continue our discussions with Epic and bring Fortnite back to Google Play.
I really don’t understand the argument about Apple’s store, when Apple has only 20-25% of the installed base and the dominant platform has many stores to choose from.
First off, that's globally, not the US (in the US it's ~50/50.) Secondly, despite Apple not having a "monopoly" on the install base they do essentially have a monopoly on store expenditures and revenue. There is a reason why Apps launch on iOS first (usually), AppStore members are more likely to buy the app and do in-app purchases than Android users. This is BY FAR. I forgot the exact numbers, but I believe it's near double or triple that of Android. The AppStore is a cash register for Apple, 30% is insanity.
I won't stop telling this: mobile platforms need not only third party app stores, but third party push notifications services too. Both iOS and Android love to kill apps in the background. This behavior, sans push notifications, cripples a lot of types of applications (chiefly, all messengers).
If there ever would be some legal pressure on Apple& Google to open up their platforms, it is important to make this point known to legislators.
Applications have to be paused to save battery, or killed to save memory. You can lookup the Android doc since the first version 10+ years ago, it explains very well the lifecycle of apps. Mobile devices would be unusable if it were not for that.
This obvious thing you say doesn't change the fact that there is no a way to wake an app from sleep without FCM push notifications or running a background service with persistent notification (which users hate), which has a lot of restrictions that get tighter with every new version of Android.
If anyone likes to follow app store case law, Oyez has the verbal arguments for Apple v Pepper that follow with text captions: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2018/17-204
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[ 6.7 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] thread> The open Android ecosystem lets developers distribute apps through multiple app stores. For game developers who choose to use the Play Store, we have consistent policies that are fair to developers and keep the store safe for users. While Fortnite remains available on Android, we can no longer make it available on Play because it violates our policies. However, we welcome the opportunity to continue our discussions with Epic and bring Fortnite back to Google Play.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/13/21368079/fortnite-epic-an...
You just don't start a law suite by violating the terms, then go ahead and cry about it.
I am not sure about Apple.
Mahatma Gandhi did that, and society nowadays thinks he was within his rights.
Uber also did that, but isn’t universally acclaimed for it (¿yet?)
(There’s a large legal difference in that the Gandhi was a person and Uber a company, but Uber somewhat got away with its actions. That’s an indicator that society isn’t unanimous in condemning those actions)
This could and, I think, will be similar. This strong protest by Epic will lead to change.
Whether their cause is a good one is orthogonal to this.
They didn't make this in the time it took Apple to reject it. It's all pre-planned
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6B4glqJFz0&feature=emb_rel_...
(FWIW I despise many of Epic's decisions, particularly their hostile attitude towards Linux as a platform, so no, I'm not biased towards them.)
Besides that, Epic themselves play Gatekeeper through the Epic Game Store and pay big money to ensure they are the Gatekeeper (excluding retail and other platforms), made on kids by loot boxing them.
Apple and Google are gatekeepers to all mobile devices (practically), but the value they add as gatekeepers is questionable. Certainly there is some value in their delivery (and much lesser so, their security) service; but their fees are not market set (since they are effectively monopolies by device type). If there were actual competitors, their rates would be much lower... around 2-5% probably.
It could be the best thing to happen in this space for a while.
Users expect to be able to do that, so it is a non-starter to run a commercial app store that Google's already turned into a second class citizen on Android.
Surely other app stores should be able to compete on an even playing field with Google, and be allowed to implement background installation, auto-upgrading and batch installation of apps.
This is a fine - even advantageous - for open stores like F-Droid, as the target market is users who explicitly don't want more Google spyware on their phone. But for large software companies pushing out profitable apps that require Play apis, it wouldn't be feasible.
What Apple is doing feels unfair, but making an antitrust case against them is going to be a stretch with current laws.
Note: Not a legal expert, this is just my understanding.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dividing_territories
If you own an app and remove it from all App Stores, you’ll quickly see what value they add. It’s the millions of users who are able to download your product.
Amazing coincidence that both charge 30%, isn't it?
Most of the value is being provided by the app developers.
30 - 50% is an acceptable markup in the retail world, like a bricks and mortar store selling furniture, but the purchase of virtual currency is not the same as a retail transaction. It's closer to the sort of service a money changer provides, or even a credit card merchant. The fee for such as service should be in the range of 3 - 18%, not 30%.
That’s just clearly not true.
App store owners are compensated fairly by the 30% fee they charge as commission on sales. But the Fortnite case is not about sales. It is about the re-supply of virtual currency for use within a game. The customer is already established. There is no new selling or marketing or delivery required of the app store owner.
To recognise the differences between product sales vs ongoing consumable resupply, such as virtual currency, app store vendors should do what physical world vendors do and charge different fees that are commensurate with the value add.
Retailers charge 30-50% markup to cover the overheads of rent and sales staff. What Apple does with the app store is similar, and so their 30% fee is in step.
Forex dealers and banks charge 3% - 18% for financial transactions such as currency exchange and credit card financing. Given that Apple isn't even providing financing for Fortnite's virtual currency, a fee in the order of 5 - 10% would be reasonable in this case.
What's at stake here should not be the all or nothing duel that Apple has initiated by banning Fortnite from the App store. Apple should just evolve, and introduce a second tier charge for consumables.
Would it make sense for Walmart to charge one price (say $100) for every item it sells in every one of its stores? Of course not. Walmart and every other real world retailer charges different prices for different things, depending on how much value they add. Apple should do the same.
Wondering if instead Apple should look at pricing breaks when a customer spends over a certain amount on IAP or certain repeat transactions. In effect trying to differentiate the take they get for whatever initial bit but incentivize monetizing customers for the long haul. That has precedent with the subscription model they have been pushing to achieve similar pricing breaks as a compromise down to 15%
As you point out, awinder, it would be possible to rort the rules by charging zero for the app, and then making the bulk of the revenue come from the IAP, if the former costs 30% and the latter costs 0%.
Apple could overcome those technical nonsensibilities by simply defining a second tier lower charge of say 10% in a common sense way, and then granting second tier status to the kinds of transactions that deserve it in a common sense interpretation.
Without a second tier to app store pricing, Apple is not going to please all the people all of the time. Dissatisfaction is inevitable.
With a second tier, sensibly applied, everyone's a winner, all of the time.
When you say "devoid of content" is that a criticism because you don't agree with my proposal that Apple introduce tiered pricing? Or something else? Would you care to elaborate?
For example your walmart analogy isn’t an analogy of anything in this situation and you don’t explain that.
And of now you are talking about Apple using common sense rules to decide what is an is acceptable, which of course is what they think they have been doing all along. People disagree on what is common sense.
The pattern is that you appear to be making interesting but flawed suggestions and then not taking seriously people’s responses to them.
I’ll take the App Store experience thanks. Doesn’t matter to me what they charge. If developers want my money they’ll take the 30% haircut.
Google Play Store won out on Android simply because the multitude of stores was a nightmare for customers. They don’t want multiple stores, they want one store on this phone, that will also be on their next phone. Any ‘monopoly’ wasn’t seized by Google, it was pushed eagerly on them by customers craving consolidation and simplicity.
Same for me, I don’t want 5 blasted stores on my iPhone. I want one store and run by someone I trust. The same goes for my Switch too, I’m quite happy for Nintendo to run the store for it. If I don’t like how they run it, I’ll get a PS 5 or XBOX. That’s where the competition is. I have plenty of choices thanks.
On Android, the F-droid app store (https://f-droid.org/) comes closest but it has nowhere near the breadth of the Debian repos.
I think you're getting a bit hung up on the language -- "appliance" and "console" are trying to communicate basically the same thing, e.g., a device which on a technical level could absolutely be a general purpose computing platform but has been restricted from that by design.
And even assuming the antitrust/monopoly argument holds, is there some barely-known exception to “general devices only”?
I’d love it if I could load my own stuff onto consoles, but don’t see how this could be practically compelled in a way that isn’t massively impactful to _everything_, especially with security and piracy implications.
Nevertheless I think Apple are making some missteps. I think they made a mistake on the game streaming service decision. Epic can go take a running jump though.
That being said, I would be perfectly happy if an outcome of this was that end users were able to install whatever software they liked on game consoles.
So what ? There is no legal requirement that computers must have user-installable apps or comply with some standard around openness. Nor is there some rationale as to why computers should be treated differently to any other device that can run apps.
And if Sony decides to ship a browser with PS5 does it suddenly switch to a general purpose computer device and must allow competing app stores. And if they remove it does it switch back to a console.
The whole concept is completely nonsensical and unworkable.
The software limitations is where the arbitrary restrictions come in. But as you say there is no legal requirement for "user-installable apps".
But there ARE laws about anti-competitive behaviour. Whether they apply? The courts will decide soon I guess.
I can see it from the point where Apple makes Apps and yet also profits from their competitors Apps.
Mind you, I can also see a reasoning that by keeping an App in the market Apple can set a base minimum for quality, hence setting a floor for the experience for end users. But they could do that via their gatekeeping anyway too...
There isn't much difference between that and a modern gaming console (apart from the orientation being around games/interactive entertainment). Take my PS4, for example: beyond the games there's pretty capable light photo and video editing software, a web browser (based on Webkit, actually, and has a surprisingly pleasant and minimal UI/UX even when using just the controller and not an external keyboard and mouse), a ton of content apps (Netflix, Disney+, Spotify, YouTube, DAZN, etc) as well as Twitch and the Playstation Network platform (essentially social media). In my opinion the only thing holding it back from gaining more apps and completely eating up the lower end of the desktop market is that developing apps for it is prohibitively expensive (gotta order a dev kit). Even at that I still plan to keep it around as a very light desktop alternative when I replace it with the next generation.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/devki...
Would you be okay with a Microsoft-owned app store that controls all app purchases and in-app purchases for all PCs?
1. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4020089/windows-10-...
Not a problem I personally experience but one many people have reported. This may also be less of a problem with COVID, I'm not sure.
You can certainly do that. But we are also allowed to wish/hope/verbalise/act to make the current thing better.
As for what "better" is? Ultimately that's decided by the courts but we can express wishes.
I hope what you mean is that someone else would be making the argument that the checkbox is necessary: claiming a crowd of people are a single inconsistent argument is disingenuous.
What do you mean by "held liable"? It can't be in the legal sense, because Microsoft has never been held legally liable for Windows malware, and Apple has never been held legally liable for Mac malware.
"In 2014 the US Federal Trade Commission ordered Apple to pay out $32.3m (£24.6m) to reimburse American parents for unauthorised app purchases made by their children."[0]
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/mar/11/my-kids-spent-...
If Apple isn't the payment processor, they're off the hook.
But even if you allow filesystem access, it's only for 'non-system' partitions (e.g. sdcard). Unless you rooted your phone (also a pretty tedious operation with a potential to brick the phone), normal apps can't even read files on the system partition, let alone overwrite them, except their 'own' data.
This is good from the security point, e.g. you can run pretty much any app and simply remove it if you feel like it's suspicious and asking for too many permissions. Similar to running a random Docker image: you can try out software without taking risks of losing control over your system, allowing certain capabilities if necessary (e.g. ports, paths). There might be a Docker vulnerability of course, but it's pretty unlikely for you as an individual to be targeted by it.
But it's extremely frustrating when you know what are you doing and which risks you are willing to take, but have to jump through hoops to do things that are otherwise trivial on desktop.
In theory, you could request broad permissions, and have an interpreter sitting inside your app, dynamically loading its own code over the wire, so you'll never have to update from the app store (unless you want more permissions granted). But as far as I understand, this is forbidden by the Play Store policies (e.g. Facebook got told off for doing this https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/googl... ). Although I'd imagine it's easy to slip such code past reviewers, unless your app is very popular and worthy a more thorough review that can catch it.
Also I'd imagine there is some grey area there, e.g. your whole app could be a webview simply displaying web frontend -- surely it's okay to dynamically load javascript? Not sure how the policy works in such cases.
I switch between streaming services based on the content they have. I have Steam, Epic Store and Origin on my PC because of the games and deals each have. Why would I not load a new app store (if I used my phone for anything other than a phone, camera and note-taking device)?
Oh, wait. It’s what we all did and do with computers. This isn’t some mystical unknown.
(besides, last time I checked my macOS machine is neither virus ridden nor covered in toolbars)
Yes, if you go back in time you find OSes with hideous security models that made things like keyloggers possible. Mobile OSes today do not have those problems, and have strict permission prompts that gatekeep functionality.
Yeah, I’m sure there would be some shitty experiences if people could install whatever they want on their phones, it’s the price of giving everyone that freedom. But if desktop OSes in 2020 are anything to go by, it’s really not that big of an issue.
The feature I recall liking most was the integrated software center. When I wanted an app, I just had to search the center, not comb through random websites. It was nice.
Of course, I could and did also install programs from random websites, as I saw fit. It never occurred to me that some day, I'd be forced to rely entirely on a built-in store...
The next question is though, given the incentives in place are entirely due to Apple, is that anti-competitive?
I think it is. It is also ruthless smart business to make money. Given societies rules about "make money" for corporations I can't blame them.
But I am allowed to wish it were otherwise.
It's hilarious to see people rooting for Apple as if they're the little guys.
The company that makes so much money here is Apple, not Epic. They should be willing to compromise. They gouge app developers and in turn its end users by charging a 30% ransom.
Smaller developers will be the casualties of a multi-store situation because they will be forced to support the them all.
There will therefore be no competitive pressure on benefits for developers.
This is all about more middlemen making money.
At worst, they continue their business as usual. At best the competitive pressure allows their business to stay the same but with higher margins. Most likely they would eke out a bit more money than the status quo by using another App Store competitor alongside the App Store if they choose to do so.
30% in pure profit would means a lot to regular companies/folks as well, not just the "big and greedy" ones. Just because you don't feel the pain doesn't mean other ones do.
And ultimately, some of this cost is burdened by the end user purchasing the app which is obviously harmful to everyday users such as myself.
Artists, on the other hand, only have to deal with a 10% to 15% cut when they sell their music digitally or physically through Bandcamp.
I'm a small and modest developer, and I feel like 30% and $99/year is too much. Mind you, Apple is a trillion dollar company that will take a 30% cut whether you're a worker in the 3rd world or a kid in college. I'm not sure I follow your "big and greedy" rhetoric at all here.
A large part of the security model on both systems is the ability to constrain what apps can do, and by ensuring those have happened.
The various privileged (in the security sense) sandbox entitlements on iOS can't be used by a malicious app because the malicious app can't get through the App Store. That significantly increases the bar for any malware. I assume the Google Play store similarly limits access to privileged system features, and I would fully expect the 3rd party stores do not.
Also personally: The Epic store is a terrible app, and signing up for it requires providing vastly more information to them than I ever wanted to, especially for only a single company's games, from a company that has no stated intent of reducing data collection and improving privacy. A company that also engages in scummy tactics like loot boxes, virtual currency, etc
What about macOS?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/08/fortnites-android-vu...
The suggestion is usually correct, though. Google does a terrible job of vetting Play Store apps, but they do still have some automated safety checks, and they kick out known malware once it's found.
If you allow sideloading, you give up all of that. It's still perfectly safe if you trust what you install, but you have to make that assessment. Google can't save you.
This is exactly how I wish iOS worked. It's also basically how the Mac works nowadays, except replace "App Store" with "Apple notary service."
How would you suggest Google correctly communicate the risk?
And windows has a scary sounding checkbox when you download an .exe from the internet. So what? In the old days, it never warned you, and people were CONSTANTLY getting malware by downloading random stuff from sketchy sites.
I can hardly imagine anything more pathetic than listing 4 locked down, corporate controlled devices, and calling that "choice".
The individual stores thing is actually really annoying. If you play games on Windows you're familiar with this situation. They all want to run 24/7 and cram their UI in your face at every opportunity, and you just want to play that publisher's one game. They are trying to become chat apps, and web browsers, and it's just crazy. I think my computer will explode if it sees one more web page wrapped in a "start at login" script claiming to be an "app store" or "game launcher". (Why can't these things just let me "chocolatey install" them? I know how to keep Windows apps up to date. Just accept my credit card number from inside the app. Or, horrors, a web page.)
On Windows, the underlying cause of this is "because we can". Everyone that wants a game will install an app store to get it from without thinking, because the one Microsoft offers is too limited. (They don't use Steam because it's run by a direct competitor, and Steam games kind of have that feeling like there are 3 good games in there next to 100,000,000 "I downloaded Unity this weekend, give me money!" games.)
Where I'm going with this rant is that unlimited freedom is the worst form of app distribution -- except for all the others. (I guess I have zero qualms with "go get". It works 100% of the time. Apps can't explode files all over my computer. Google provides a CDN for free.)
Which is much worse than the mobile environment. But you could still have more choice and not require the store to be running to use.
Imagine being able to go to epic games website and click “download game” and get a phone pop up “do you want to install X?”
There’s positively no need for a “store” at all.
GOG and Humble Bundle work like this on Linux (though GOG has an optional Galaxy app). You login to a website, buy and download.
Epic chooses not to do that, because they want you to run their store. But Google doesn't prevent you from doing it; Epic just chooses not to allow you to.
(No pass for the racueteering play store/app store implied)
Also, to install games from those 3rd party platforms one still needs to install and launch those platforms. So this limits usefulness of the Galaxy.
[0]: https://www.gog.com/galaxy
https://xkcd.com/927/
Only the app from GOG shows games from other platforms, that's why I prefer to launch everything from there because when I launch my windows rig on weekends no chance I remember where I bought that game.
Whenever possible, I buy from GoG, but not because I want to use Galaxy. With GoG, I just download an exe, run the installer, and my game appears in this wonderful launcher called The Freaking Start Menu. It's great.
What do I get from using a client? I don't want my games to be integrated into a social network, I just want to play them, and not be interrupted until I'm done.
------
My second choice after GoG is usually itch.io, but my third choice is actually becoming EGS. I'm not sure if this was intentional, but a significant portion (maybe even a majority?) of EGS games don't actually need EGS to run. You can download them with an open-source tool like https://github.com/derrod/legendary, back up the files, and run them. I've personally done this with Journey, Beyond Two Souls, Control, and Detroit.
A handful of Steam games allow this too (one recent example is Ori and the Will of the Wisps), but it's much less common than on the Epic Store!
Big picture mode, controller mapping, remote play, and remote play together are amazing.
Not sure what's so hard to understand. You mention downloading, installing, and revel that it's in your start menu. And don't mention updating. With launchers, there's one less step (installing), and updating is a passive thing (for better or worse). And yup, they're placed in the start menu as well.
Single player games purchased a year after release likely never need to be patched ever again.
Unfortunately AAA games with multiplayer et al seem to need to be patch immediately upon release...
Recently I've started using OS search to launch apps on my Ubuntu workstation. One day I've tried the same with game launched. When you have extensive libraries on multiple platforms it definitely helps.
Also some clients support achievements. It adds incentives (or meaning, if you will) to play some good game even after completion of campaign or something like that. Yep, not for everyone.
BTW, you can download and install games from Steam using official console client [0]. Not sure if will allow to play [all] games, though. I had limited experience with that. I managed to download windows versions of doom and quake 2 for Oculus Quest from Ubuntu.
[0] https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD
Yeah, SteamCMD can download but usually not run games—my experience is the only games that run are the handful that can run without Steam in general.
Their work with the Proton compatibility is bringing a lot of my old Windows only games to Linux too. I'll probably continue buying exclusively from Steam for this reason.
Yes, thank you! In fact Epic is one of the worst of these stupid stores about blasting you with corner-of-screen advertising even when you’re doing nothing with it.
Not sure about this. Does valve even make games anymore? /s
Go get is weird. I guess it’s still federated even with GOPROXY as a middleman, but I am still not sure how I feel about all of it. It makes sense from the perspective of ensuring things don’t maliciously break, but it feels less obvious what it’s doing than I’d hope, and that probably makes many uneasy.
I'd love to keep Google Play off my phone if there were a competitor who did a better job at surfacing truly great apps (rather than the garbage suggestions Google spams me with) and passed on a bigger piece of the pie to publishers.
To be honest, I wouldn't mind having the option to specify multiple stores that I trust the same way I do the Google Play store. I could imagine having Google Play, the Epic store, the Blizzard store, and Steam on my phone if that were necessary.
I am not worried about being spammed with stuff, as apps don't run until you open them, normally, and I already have granular controls over what notifications spam me on Android as it is.
This sounds like an absolute nightmare.
I want stores like Costco and Apple's AppStore because I trust those companies to vet brand quality and provide me a basic level of trust for the products. I'm happy to pay a 30% premium for that piece of mind.
On the other hand I would like the option to add another App Store who's "Brand of quality and trust to vet apps" I can compare to Apple's store... and so the layers go...
On the gripping hand, it is the "benevolent dictator" problem. A benevolent dictator really can be an efficient and great way to run things. For the people that agree with the dictator.
But who determines who the dictator should be and what makes them benevolent?
This would allow multiple actors to be present, while keeping things simple for the users.
The store design has a lot to do with which apps get attention.
This is exactly what F-Droid is able to do on Android, and what nearly all reasonably-popular Linux distributions have been able to do for decades.
It's basically how my Fire TV worked. I could search for a title in the home screen and it would tell me that it was on Prime Video, Hulu, Netflix or I could rent from Amazon or whatever.
Now if you were to take the package model and move it to Windows it would be the same mess we have today.
Many of us, including Apple, do not want ransomware, malware and viruses on their phone. It's not a computer. It's a phone.
IIRC FB and Uber both got caught doing things other companies couldn't do. Apple's vetting process is not foolproof either. Apps still do things I don't want them to do, on my own device.
Apple can still control the OS and device and sandbox the apps and app stores. It's not an insurmountable problem.
Google put restrictions on Android so that third party app stores can't install in the background, auto-upgrade or batch install.
> Google Play Store won out on Android simply because the multitude of stores was a nightmare for customers.
The Play Store is the only app store on Android where users can install apps in the background, auto-upgrade apps or batch install apps.
The reason the Play Store won out on Android is because it the only app store that Google allows to have the features app stores require.
https://www.cnet.com/news/just-as-critics-feared-fortnite-fo...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/01/resea...
https://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/...
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/new-android-bug-targets...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/popular-apps-on-google-play-li...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/for-t...
https://www.securityweek.com/zerodium-expects-ios-exploit-pr...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2019/09/04/why-zer...
Asking because that's the impression I get, but may be wrong.
Google is not trustworthy. Look how every time someone criticizes Google on here, a horde of pro-Google paid commenters appear, like magic.
Just ask any android developer who develop for the Chinese market where Google is absent. It's a nightmare.
I want one just one grocery store! Want less common ingredients? NO! I just want one store! I want just one hardware store! Want some part they don't carry? Sucks to be you. Just one car store, etc...
If nothing else I at least one two stores. One for regular apps and one for porn apps. You can see steam now has lots of adult apps.
I don't want 5 blasted distribution methods on my (Android) phone. I'm perfectly happy with 5 different sources, though. Put plainly: I want repositories, not stores. I get to use the same tool (app) to manage all of them, and I can add different sources if I'd like.
You must be representing the first generation that is anti-competition and pro-monopoly. It makes no sense that you would really want to have fewer options to buy a product. If the problem is trust, then clearly what you need is regulation, not a monopoly.
Now that's an interesting (though highly impractical) idea!
Imagine both app stores on every phone, providing the exact same service. There's probably no room for price fixing here, because Apple's market share is far smaller than Android's, so Apple would have a significant incentive to reduce the fees (and snatch some of Google's customers.
Now add two or three other "app store providers", and things get interesting.
For example, there's absolutely positive value for users in filtering spam. This tends to be negative value for spam senders, but that doesn't detract from the user value.
Apple's version of gatekeeping is a balance between providing a user experience that they control and design, and managing/controlling competition.
It reminds me of the internet filters at large companies. Keeps out the filth and bad actors at the detriment of being on a truly free internet. That makes sense when it's the companies computers.
But not so much when you own the device.
In the Android world, you still have an option. The option isn't good, you might end up limited, the user have to enable a scary checkbox, but you have an option. If Epic wants, they can create a micro store for android. The same thing they do with PCs today.
But you can't do it with an apple device. You have no option, no workaround. That's the monopoly that needs to be destroyed.
Even if both companies behaviors are detrimental for developers, Apple is way, way worst.
That all said: Sadly, this is not about freedom but about money. My bet is that Apply will lose the restrictions for Epic and they will drop the case.
This is probably going to fundamentally change the landscape. Congress accused the big players including Apple of anti consumer behavior. Not being in control of your own device (Read: not being able to side load software without paying a fee.) will be the downfall of the app store.
Maybe for the more expensive apps, but not for the $0.99 apps that consumers love. For those, 2-5% doesn't come anywhere near covering the credit card processing costs.
When I first used it, I wouldn't use very much and I would get notices from time to time that $10 was added to my account. When my usage went up, they did $20 for a while, and at one point I hit $50.
I think this is reasonable and if it makes the overall cost of a service lower I am all for it.
No developer or company is happy with the way Apple runs the App Store. Their commission is outrageously high, their approval process is slow and often arbitrary, and their tooling is god-awful. We all just put up with it because the iPhone/iPad install base is so large, we don't really have a choice.
That being said, I'm very reluctant to demand regulation that interferes with a private company's right to run its own products. After all, maybe Apple's attitude is precisely why their install base is so large.
But God I wish there was a competitor that knocked them down the leaderboard a few pegs. Android is great, but the ecosystem is too fractured for the market to force Apple to change.
The App Store isn’t made with developers in mind. It’s made for the average user. And right now the average user is pretty damn happy with Apple.
probably not. Visa takes a bigger cut than 2% when you buy a hamburger.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/lt/IP_15_...
2. Nobody gives a shit if this is better for developers, do they? Epic could charge +30% on IAP and use the Apple IAP system which is orders of magnitude better than anything else in the market. Developers set the pricing, and Apple handles security, authentication, refunds, etc. Consumers know it's a consistent experience across the platform.
3. The only benefit anyone seems to be able to come up with here is "choice" and a misguided belief that prices would come down as if by magic. Video game publishers took up to 60% of video game sales in physical stores, but the ARP of a video game has risen since 2008 and the advent of Steam and other online stores.
4. Seems like Apple has built a successful hardware/software play at least partially based on the fact that consumers don't have to do bullshit things like entering credit card details into some third party payment gateway to buy things, or deal with different refund policies from different folks. Consumers have flocked to the platform and now its success is being used as the basis of an attempt to strip it of its competitive advantage.
5. Same thing happened in the UK with sports coverage. The English Premier League was only broadcast on Sky until a few years ago. £29.99 a month got you all the live televised top flight soccer. Now to watch all of the televised soccer in the UK you need Sky Sports, Amazon Prime Video, and BT Sport. And Sky Sports prices have not decreased in real terms. (Oh, and BT's tech infrastructure is hot garbage.) I don't know anyone who loves the experience of having three different services to deal with and paying more money. Nobody is bleating about "choice" now.
6. I object to this on exactly the same terms as I object to Spotify's bitching that IAP margins -- which have been the same since before Spotify launched -- are too thin. They operate a business where they pay sixty cents of every dollar they make to rights holders for fuck's sake. Why are they bitching at Apple telling them that if they want to do a monthly subscription and net £9.99, they need to charge £14.28? Why can Spotify try to tell Apple that the HomePod -- a fucking speaker -- should let Spotify onto the device natively (when you can already connect via Bluetooth)?
7. Nearly every online store has serious arbitrary limitations placed on it by the operator of the store. Many of these are to do with the user experience, but many of them are a means of paying the bills for something they fund (hosting, marketing, app review team, developers working on APIs). It helps them sell phones, but it's intertwined with the user experience.
8. Gruber's point stands: if you think it's OK for Microsoft to prevent Sony from selling a PlayStation game streaming service on the Xbox Store, I don't see why you have an issue with this. It's not the same as Netflix: it's more like an app store within an app store.
You're totally within your rights to think that! (My advice to you: don't start a business literally built on top of Apple's platform!)
> a couple automated API calls to process a monthly payment.
This sort of oversimplification makes it hard to take your argument seriously. I'm pretty sure you don't believe that, but just in case you do…
This article[1] suggests that Apple made $4.2bn from the App Store in the 10 years between 2008 and 2018.
Here are some of the things I would put into the cost lines for Apple's app store P&L (the company operates a combined P&L):
1. Multiple data centres dedicated to the app store and routing third-party notifications. That's both hosting of the apps and ongoing cost associated with e.g. push notifications, software updates. Each of these data centres has energy, staff, hardware costs. That is to say: there is both opex and capex here, which means Apple isn't only netting ongoing costs from revenue but also thinking about the cost of the capital invested in infrastructure up front.
2. The card processing charges associated with customers buying the app in the first place, and subsequent in-app purchases.
3. The cost of Apple's App Review Teams (three dedicated offices: Cork, Shanghai, Sunnyvale). That's 300 people.[2] There are costs behind them, too (for example: recruitment, HR, management).
4. Product and engineering costs associated with the team Apple has working on internal systems and services dedicated to app review.
5. An apportionment of costs associated with customers seeking technical support in-store and online due to third-party apps.
6. An apportionment of costs associated with the development and maintenance of services and APIs which Apple develops and makes available to app developers. (For example, sign-on with Apple.)
In 2018 the app store had seen 130 billion apps downloaded[3], with an average app size of 38mb[4]. That's 4.94 exabytes of data excluding updates.
Microsoft for many years charged Xbox developers for certification of games and patches, in part because of the bandwidth costs of distributing those patches to its customers, but also because providing this sort of service is mired by multiple perilous overheads -- which, I have to say, people on the web tend to misunderstand/ignore/dismiss.
Fortnite has nearly 150 million installs on iOS. It's 1.8 gigabytes. That's 270 million gigabytes, and the game is free. 30% of users don't spend a dime in Fortnite. That's 81 million gigabytes of free bandwidth for Epic, before you forget about the fact that Apple promotes the game etc.
Neither party is a saint here. Apple and Epic both get a lot of out the app being in the store. But Epic has multiple options to resolving this without trying to rob Apple's platform of a significant part of its USP.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/20/18273179/apple-icloud-itu... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/21/how-apples-app-review-proces... [3] https://www.appannie.com/en/insights/market-data/data-behind... [4] https://sweetpricing.com/blog/2017/02/average-app-file-size/
Installer infrastructure used to be nearly free. I absolutely disagree that Apple or Google are providing significant value here. The app discovery ship has sailed and no one is going to find your small apps on those platforms. The review processes might benefit users, but is a detriment for developers who aren’t guaranteed the ability to distribute apps they’ve invested in.
Steve Ballmer wasn’t stupid for laughing at the App Store. He just wildly underestimated the stupidity of the average developer. No one would have taken the App Store deal in the 90s and Apple would have been laughed out of the industry. Now everyone throws caution to the wind and marries into a system where they have no voice and no leverage. It’s absolutely crazy.
So you think the “average developer” is “stupidly” doing what they need to make money?
Does Epic deliver any “value” by selling skins? How they any different than Candy Crush?
Imagine if Walmart was the ONLY retail store on the planet and took 30% of all revenue while selling their Great Value products in industries that have 30% margin (ex: music streaming).
It’s time for regulators IMO.
This feels pretty subjective. My point was that you were suggesting the App Store is just a card processing gateway. It's significantly more than that.
> Installer infrastructure used to be nearly free.
And viruses and malware were everywhere, and many folks hated using their computers. People forget how far we've come since the days of malfunctioning and virus-riddled PCs being the butt of jokes.
> I absolutely disagree that Apple or Google are providing significant value here
Eh? App review? Literally a general purpose computing platform with close to zero malware / spyware? User satisfaction for iPhone amongst the highest for any consumer product in history.
> The review processes might benefit users
Ah. Yes. That's the core of this I think: Apple cares about Apple, then Apple customers, then developers. Developers seem to care most about developers. Customers seem to care most about customers.
> developers who aren't guaranteed the ability to distribute apps they've invested in
What? If your app conforms to the rules of Apple's app store, you are absolutely able to distribute the app.
> Steve Ballmer wasn't stupid for laughing at the App Store. He just wildly underestimated the stupidity of the average developer.
Tough gig to argue that every single app developer on the app store is stupid and you and Steve Ballmer are the smart ones.
> No one would have taken the App Store deal in the 90s
I want to write this in capital letters: every. Single. Consumer. Would. The app store is better for consumers. It's better to have one trustworthy company (Apple) with my credit card information. It's better to have a simple hardware-based authentication for payments like TouchID or FaceID. It's better to have no malware and spyware. It's better to have apps which don't crash or have showstopping bugs. It's better to have refunds controlled by one predictable entity. All of those things are made possible or significantly easier by the App Store.
> It's absolutely crazy
Crazy might look like dismissing all the huge benefits consumers love because one developer was unwilling to either accept the commission one of their marketplaces charges, or increase their prices to offset it.
It’s hard to be sure whether this is an honest mistake or not, given the generally well informed community.
The law exists that the strongest might not always get their way. Literally anyone hitting it /should/ have the same claims, rights, laws, and the same process as the very rich and strong when up against these enormous "legal persons". It's an ideal and we won't achieve perfection in trying to get there and there are tradeoffs with other ideals.
But let's never lose sight of the ideal of equality before the law and the strongest should not always get their way.
It's just so important. Without it, we end up with people as the enemy of the state with its monopoly on violent enforcement, then on to revolution and all that horror. I think it's an ideal that is slightly more important than the desire and profit of google and apple claiming the right to tax success and profit as though they were nation-states and the welfare of other big, well-funded profitable companies that don't like that. Regulatory capture is a disaster and an even bigger one that it first appears, be you leftist, rightist, collectivist, rugged individualist or, more hopefully, someone not so easy to label who thinks about individual issues and wants an outcome approximating what you think is best for everyone. We're all united against corruption, I have no doubt, we only disagree on whether particular cases are or are not that. The unity opposed to corruption is a thing that gets lost quite often as the division are imposed on us.
If the rate mattered, Google would have lowered it to compete with Apple for developers.
Let’s not forget, you can frame this as a “cost” to developers, but it can just as easily be framed as a convenience fee to consumers, I as a consumer am happy to pay it.
I agree that fees seem somewhat high but we might be underestimating the cost it takes to check all the apps. One reasonable change of law could be a requirement for cost and revenue transparency for app stores and if we are hell bent on lowering prices maybe even a stipulation that margins must remain reasonable or even that stores must be run by a separate nonprofit with its own goals and guidelines.
However, all of this seems to be more in the realm of congress and law making rather than the courts. I don’t think that there are many good legal grounds for epic here. Everyone is paying... they can’t really claim damages in a competitive market sense as they are not worse of than any competitor.
You can only get nothing for 2-5% because that barely meets the payment processing fees (of course, a large company can negotiate a lower rate). If you’re saying 2-5% plus payment processing fees, then that might be possible depending on the solution and what’s provided to users and developers.
https://archive.fo/Z0huU
If lowering the cost of app sales royalties to all 3rd developers is the only result of this, I'd say this will be worth it.
Well we don’t know for sure there’s a very good chance the negotiations have been going on behind the scenes and they finally broke down far enough that Epic decided to pull the trigger and force the issue.
Even if Apple and Google have wargamed the move and found out they would definitely lose, would they do anything without first being confronted? I'd bet they wouldn't, because that would be several hundreds of millions in lost revenue. It's better for them to stay quiet, perhaps try to appease under the table those who have deep enough pockets to challenge them (e.g. Amazon), keep milking the cow for as long as possible.
In 2019, the App Store had a gross revenue of 54 billion. Apple's cut should be 30% of that, or 16.2 billion.
Multiply that over several decades, and also consider that gross revenue of the App Store is growing at around 10% per year - we are talking about over 200 billion of revenue for Apple over the next decade, minimum.
So yes - this is a big deal!
So the only loss is the time they're off the store, plus legal. They just need to get this lawsuit started, maybe lose a couple weeks profits from the iOS store, and they've created the possibility of permanently increasing profits by 20%.
If Epic wins and are allowed to offer alternate IAP for 20% discount, that increase profits for Fortnite on iOS by 10%, but all the other Fortnite platforms lose 20%.
Maybe Epic will raise the virtual prices of Fortnite goods over time to make up for it, eg a skin will be 1500 vbucks instead of 1250. But I'm guessing Epic has larger ambitions, such as making V-bucks systems for all games that use Unreal Engine.
[0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/fortnite-statistics/#2
I’ve read it a number of times but here’s the top link from today’s search for this - https://9to5mac.com/2019/04/08/iphone-apple-watch-teen-surve...
More like cannibalization between several large and ruthless corporations, and mostly because those who should have protected this market from being cornered into its current corrupt state, miserably failed at that (time and again).
Many may be hopeful about the results of this move, which is no doubt part of Epic's strategy. However, I expect that the results will mostly just favor the bottom line of whoever wins this fight. I'm rather convinced that it won't be much of an improvement for end users.
Maybe end users will benefit for a short while after a victory by Epic, until the company decides to "cash in" on their win and end users will (again) get pretty much what they had up till now. Because that is apparently what Epic can charge its users.
The debate needs to be on whether or not they should take a cut on in-app purchases, and/or what that cut should be, and/or if they should allow third-party processors where the store owner doesn't see profit.
Why anyone supports Apple is a mystery to me. What if the web forced you to use Apple Payments? What if Microsoft forced all installs to go through the Microsoft Store?
Apple took focus from the web and then extinguished openness. It's tyranny.
Apple recently rolled out "Sign-In With Apple", which creates burner e-mail address that you can seamlessly use with 3rd party services. As a privacy-conscious consumer, this was great! On top of that, Apple forced all of its developers to support "Sign-In With Apple". This is one of the many reasons I continue to use Apple's phone and OS, because it gives me some peace of mind.
Apple Payments, similarly, gives me some financial peace of mind by providing me with one centralized place where I can view and cancel my subscriptions/purchases. I can't tell you how many times I've forgotten to unsubscribe from a service that I don't use. With Apple's in-app payments system, I can keep tabs on everything. It's like a user-friendly financial reconciliation layer.
Both of these Apple services place some amount of burden on the developer, and I'd even argue that the first example was pretty broadly celebrated by privacy-minded HN readers. The strongest devil's advocate argument is that the second example provides the same value to Apple customers, and that's a distinguishing feature of its platform that it ought to be able to maintain.
There's a strong argument to be made that one ought to be able to side-load apps and install competing app stores on their iPhones (I tend to agree), but that's somewhat orthogonal to this particular issue, especially considering the Google Play Store action.
Apple spins this as privacy, but it's really a salvo they fired against other companies. Notably Google and Facebook. Apple seeks to weaponize its userbase in the war over attention.
Apple wins by inserting themselves as middleman into every transaction they can.
A "Sign in With Apple" user isn't your customer anymore.
If you think they value privacy, you should consider the telemetry they collect on you and the conversations they record.
Yes, as a customer, I don't wish to provide my email / identity with every service I use. If it takes Apple being the "middleman" to have the power to control how a business interacts with me as a customer, then so be it.
> If you think they value privacy, you should consider the telemetry they collect on you and the conversations they record.
I used to work at Apple on their services team, and I can tell you right now that Apple has virtually no useful telemetry information that can be tied to an individual user. iOS telemetry data is tied to a periodically recycling identifier that's un-correlated with your iCloud identity.
...that works right up until Apple bans you, or one of your favorite services, or just demands you pony up 30% of all the money you spend online.
You think that's unlikely? In the 80s, Microsoft was the hero and IBM was the villain. In the late 90s and early 2000s, Google was everyone's favorite. During the Arab Spring, Facebook was a popular tool for liberation.
Every corporation will become evil if it becomes successful enough. Give Apple centralized control over web authentication and they'll be just as ruthless as they are with the app store. We're watching a shift in public perception happen right now.
The only long-term defense we have is decentralizataion, and you're fighting that. Why? So you won't get spam that you never see?
They worked at Apple and probably have a different perception than someone who works uphill against Apple.
And if you'll excuse some unsolicited feedback, your arguments will bear way more weight if you do away with the histrionics.
It wasn't a personal attack, unless "They worked at Apple and probably have a different perception" is a personal attack.
I don't harbor any ill will against you. Characterizing my words that way is disingenuous.
> This is a nuanced issue.
From my perspective, it's black and white. Apple is clearly taking advantage of market forces and is hurting small players.
> your arguments will bear way more weight if you do away with the histrionics.
The arguments that are heard are the ones that engender empathy. We've been at the point of logical discussion for years, and that hasn't gotten us anywhere. Now the outrage has come to a boil, and I won't censor myself or pretend this is a friendly game of sports.
Apple is a trillion dollar vampire. I'm letting my representatives know that.
You're probably on the wrong forum, then. Either that or you'll have to understand that not everybody sees this as black and white, and maybe understand exactly why.
> Apple is a trillion dollar vampire. I'm letting my representatives know that.
I wish you and your crusade the best of luck.
Another commenter framed it well: that Apple behaves both as a consumer union as well as a protection racket, sometimes hiding behind the former in pursuit of the latter. It's definitely worth questioning if 30% is a fair transaction fee, but OTOH that's how much every app store charges in the market today, including Epic's very own.
> You think that's unlikely? In the 80s, Microsoft was the hero and IBM was the villain. In the late 90s and early 2000s, Google was everyone's favorite. During the Arab Spring, Facebook was a popular tool for liberation.
Yes, and IBM eventually withered away into irrelevance and Microsoft hasn't created a business with dominant market share since Office. Facebook still is a tool for liberation, just for the "wrong" people, and Google still provides a robust Search and Maps product. One day, both of those companies might find themselves no longer the dominant player — just like DEC, IBM, and Microsoft.
> The only long-term defense we have is decentralizataion, and you're fighting that. Why? So you won't get spam that you never see?
I understand that, decentralization has a lot of merit — it's what affords us the option to not use Apple at all and have nothing to do with its walled garden. We still have the option to not use Apple today. The day this stops being true is the day that we all have to worry.
There are many people in this world who think they would pay a steep social penalty if they switched away from iPhones. Now part of me just wants to blame them for having shallow friends or whatever, but I try and keep that part of me in check.
Yeah, but to suggest that you don't have the option to switch away from Apple just because you might have friends that don't like using anything except for iMessage is a real stretch. You don't have to be a part of shallow iMessage groups, any more than you have to be a part of Instagram. They're both frivolities.
I’m not a fan of alternate app stores.
But I’m happy to see someone force this issue. So we can stop dancing around it and settle things.
1. Apple acts like a sort of consumer union, coordinating behavior of a massive and lucrative audience so that apps have to meet certain minimum standards to reach it.
2. Apple acts like a protection racket, extracting a piece of the consumer surplus because they can.
It seems that you like the benefits of #1, and I agree with you. The problem is that in the Fortnite case, it appears to be a case of #2 posturing as #1. Does anyone truly believe that Fortnite players are better off paying 30% more to Apple?
If Apple's payment processing fee was more in line with the industry e-commerce standard, this would look a lot more like #1 than #2.
Forced?
So you want a company to take an arbitrary 30% of my livelihood?
This is why Congress has to act. Consumers don't understand the damage these companies are doing.
I’d love to have the option to sideload apps on my iPhone. I understood that I couldn’t do this when I bought it however, and don’t really see any compelling arguments as to why Apple would lose - there seem to be many, many arguments based on fuzzy-feelings like “I don’t like it” and “I feel 30% is too high” and “but it’s morally wrong” and “well if you imagine it this way it’s really a monopoly” and “no, I have decided that arbitrarily this would only apply to ‘general purpose’ devices”, none of which sound like legal arguments.
I assume Epic is putting this up to lose in order to gamble that the law is changed in response to that suit, in which case they’d be fighting presumably against at least the lobby power of Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo and many other interests.
As would developers.
Computing used to be free as in speech. You could host an `.exe` file on your website and point customers there to download it.
Now most people use phones and >50% of Americans are out of your reach.
Don't claim that security sandboxing, privacy, and protecting users is why this has been done. With the appropriate design, users can be protected and the freedom to compute can remain.
Don't push the blame on the web not being a sufficiently native platform. Cross-platform APIs could have been built. It would have saved centuries of human effort writing both Android and iPhone apps. Think of all the human innovation capital wasted. Maybe some of these people could have been solving cancer instead.
Don't compare this to Nintendo. If I write a video game in C++, I can distribute it on PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, Android, iPhone, Steam, and on my website. Most gamers own more than one of these platforms at a time, making it easier to reach them, but they tend to have only one type of phone. Additionally, Nintendo is not a general purpose computer. I don't do dating, online banking, taxes, or groceries on the Switch. We don't hand out Switches to school children.
The App Store's unhealthy product placements and ratings led to a race to the bottom. Apps are $0.99 with a lifetime of free updates. And Apple takes a 30% cut. They dehumanize engineers and small businesses.
In a time of pestilence and famine, Apple's grain silos are overflowing. Yet they take from the mouths of the very people that helped build their platform with back-breaking and thankless effort.
Sure, phones are not desktops of 2001, but for many people that is a good thing. In fact, despite several attempts by different companies to create open phones, most people Demonstrate that they would rather buy and use closed ones. If you want true open OS on your phone, you probably have a niche desire.
Personally, I would rather the App Store be more selective on whether apps really worked or not. More open certainly has appeal, but more low quality apps to wade through doesn’t appeal much.
It's a walled garden, and that's what I intentionally purchased when I brought my devices. These software developers and service providers have a presumption that my money is simply there for the taking, but if they want to get it, they have to come to me, and I have very intentionally chose the platform I want to use. If their services were so important to me, then they could just withdraw them from the appstore, and I would obviously have to go out and buy a different device.
In general, I think free-form app distribution should be the way to go for any device under the general-purpose computer category. Multiple walled gardens can be spawned on top of that.
> In general, I think free-form app distribution should be the way to go for any device under the general-purpose computer category.
Then launch a company, provide that to the market, and see if that’s something consumers want. There are already plenty of companies that provide that though, so you might struggle to compete.
General purpose computing is also not a legal category of product, nor is it really what you’re making it out to be. Playstations, Xboxes and my car stereo are all general purpose computers. The issue isn’t whether the device in question is a general purpose computer, or an embedded system. It’s whether a company is allowed to create an operating system where they can control what software is distributed to it. As iOS does not have a monopoly, I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be up to consumers as to whether it exists or not. Personally, as a consumer, Apple make a phone that I want to use, and part of the value I see in it is their control over app distribution.
My argument is that they are not. I know certain individuals have likened them to general-purpose computers due to the underlying processors getting more and more like desktops'. But the majority of users do not use them as general-purpose computers. So I actually used the term to differentiate smartphones from things like video game consoles.
Even though I still stand by my support for free-form app distribution, I understand that from a consumer perspective, Apple's current practices may not tip the scale between good and bad. (And as a developer, I also do not want to submit my apps to 10 different stores neither)
But at the very least, I hope Apple can (eventually) improvement their one-size-fits-all pricing model and payment methods. They need to provide devs with more flexible ways of rolling out app updates, and give price cuts to apps that barely use any Apple resources.
Then I’d suggest you come up with a different term to use, because the phrase ‘general purpose computer’ has been in use since at least the 1940s as far as I know, and it’s definition is quite different from yours.
I think the meaning you’re trying to use is that a PlayStation only runs PlayStation games/apps, that only Sony gets to decide what PlayStation games/apps are released, and that the users know this when they buy one? Therefore customers know that they can’t run arbitrary software on it when they purchase one? Because that’s exactly true for the Apple App Store as well. Customers are well aware of the limitations of the system, and it is used by Apple as a differentiating factor in their marketing.
> Even though I still stand by my support for free-form app distribution, I understand that from a consumer perspective, Apple's current practices may not tip the scale between good and bad.
But such channels are already open to you as both a developer and a customer. Furthermore, those channels have a majority market share. Why is it necessary for all platforms to suit your preferences?
> But at the very least, I hope Apple can (eventually) improvement their one-size-fits-all pricing model and payment methods.
I would agree. It is something they have already been improving over time though. I’ve had plenty of run ins with App Store rules myself, and I hope they continue to improve. But I also really hope the App Store is something they keep putting effort into, because even with the cut, it’s an absurdly valuable sales channel. I personally quite grateful that Apple have collected such a large amount of high spending customers for me to market to.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24146987
For everyone defending Apple, consider your main desktop/laptop computer and how you would feel if all of the apps you installed not only had to be downloaded from Apple/Dell/Lenovo/Microsoft but also 30% of any software or subscriptions you bought on that device went to one of those companies. Apple sells devices with high margins on top of all of this. Which is probably why they are the most valuable public company in the world besides maybe Saudi Aramco.
As far as politics goes, you can forget about it in America at least. The senate can’t figure out how to deal with the economic fallout from this pandemic; the idea that they’d be able to pass a law on this is genuinely laughable.
That something else could be bashing Apple and Google.
It can force regulators to act.
It can put pressure on politicians to create new laws.
I have apps not listed in PlayStore but works just fine.
How would Google actually block it?
It's actually even slightly easier to install APKs on Android than installing non-Mac-App-Store software on macOS — with Android it prompts you right when you open to allow or disallow installs from the source you downloaded from, whereas macOS makes you dig around in Settings the first time. I tried installing the Epic store just now on Android, and it was a fairly seamless experience.
I'm sure it gets fewer sales, since the Play store is bundled with most Android phones and the Epic store isn't. But it's pretty different than an outright ban: the Play store is charging you the 30% Google tax for reach/audience, but you're free to list on an alternative store if you choose to.
"The enemy of my enemy is my ally."
"The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries"
https://schlockmercenary.fandom.com/wiki/The_Seventy_Maxims_...
That precedent is being set anyway, the Epic Games store still exists on Android, and you can get Fortnite through it, and this dispute can't do anything but bring more attention to that fact.
Of course, that kind of does show a way in which they are better for devs and consumers than Apple, since dispute over store terms with devs are less of a total barrier to delivering/selling (for devs) or getting access to (for consumers) apps on the platform.
Note, however, that not just anyone can publish a game on EGS, so you'd have to already be an established developer.
Anyways, Neptune's Pride is very very fun and I can't wait to play it again!
After Epic store launched on the PC in 2018, Epic used their platform's growing popularity to bait and/or strong arm (it's unclear to me) indie developers into exclusivity contracts on Epic's game store. This action caused a massive uproar in the gaming community because with those exclusivity deals, Epic made developers break existing preorders.
This isn't about freedom or choice or walled gardens. It's about cutting off a slightly bigger slice of a billion dollar pie.
They took the deal, they didn't get their life/safety threatened.
There was some really shitty behavior by developers who took the pot of money who had already made promises to crowdfunders previously. That's on the developer though, and they should be judged appropriately for their actions.
As my post says: it's unclear to me which tactic was used with which developers, or how those contracts influenced the promises developers made to preorder customers.
We don't know mostly because those contracts are secret.
The developers agreed to the deal. If that meant they had to do something shitty (Like not-provide steam keys to backers who paid for that during a crowdfunding campaign), you should be upset with the developers. They made a promise and then they went back on it.
I don't think it's fair to hold Epic's feet to the fire because a developer took the money. If someone offers you a lot of money to break a promise (and you take it), this is a reflection of your character.
Epic didn't make anyone do anything. They made the choice.
If somebody offers you a lot of money to do something immoral, and you chose to accept it that makes YOU immoral. It also should cast a shadow on the person offering you the deal because they too know what they are asking of you is immoral.
I don't think anyone in this deal is acting in the best interest of users. Some of these options may be better than others for indie devs.
In this scenario, much of the uproar that happened was developers breaking promises, and the blame for that being placed on Epic as well. Epic merely offered better deals(in the form of a better revenue split) and cash offers to developers that are notorious for being poorly funded. I don't see how this is a bad thing.
In fact, I'd make the argument that there being more competition in the PC video game marketplace is a good thing that will benefit the consumer.
There have been good deals for developpers, and good deals that developper shouldn't have taken but still took despite their previous engagements to their funders, but Epic literally had no position to strong arm anyone into anything, and they didn't bait anyone - no one signed then realized "oh damn, I didn't think money for exclusivity meant money for exclusivity !".
Epic just said "hey look at this bag of money, I give it to you if you put your game here".
no one thinks corporations don’t do what’s in their best interest monetarily
If this were just about money, it would be totally irrational. Epic does have money to gain if they're successful, but they have a lot more money to lose if they fail. It's kind of a suicide mission to simultaneously take on two of the most powerful corporations on Earth. No rational purely profit-seeking corporation would follow this strategy.
I'm amazed "feeding starving artists" is turned into a bad thing.
Steam needed that competition. Valve's 30% cut of sales is ludicrous considering that they do not manually audit, validate, or curate the software on their store. They don't even handle security properly—there have been multiple instances of Valve ignoring vulnerabilities in Steam.
I think Epic and Tim Sweeney have acted with remarkable consistency.
- Grow the dev team enough to accelerate time to launch--QA extra engineers, heck, the devs even used the money to pay for porting the game to other devices!
- Guarantee that they could continue to fund development of the game after launch. Bugfixes, DLC, etc.
- Have enough left over to "try again" and launch a sophomore game regardless of the performance of this one.
You'd think that fans of indie games would love this. Who could possibly be opposed to having an indie dev get funds that would enable them to graduate to managing a small indie game studio instead of a ramen diet & 20 hour work days in the living room.
And yet they got enormous amounts of hate from so-called indie game fans and members of the gaming community. And yes, the devs were aware that the hate was coming from a disproportionately small number of people and that most people don't actually care at all. But still, the psychological toll of having to deal with the harassment was enough to make them strongly consider not taking the money--even though it was the right thing to do both from a financial pov and from a development pov (because it would guarantee they could finish and support the game).
The crazy thing is that even if you hate epic you should love these deals: cheer for your favorite dev, then wait a year and buy the game on Steam, doubly sticking it to the man.
It would be choice and competition for the consumer if users could access any game through either platform and choose their favorite.
$20 to a charity of your choice if you show affirmative proof of (within 7 days¹) a contract showing strong-arming². Email is in profile if I don't notice HN reply. When you make your comment showing strong-arming, I will make two comments one saying "this is strong-arming" and one saying "this is not" and we can see what the community votes up.
If there are at least 5 votes and the former wins, you get to pick the charity. Otherwise, it goes to AMF.
¹ just so that there is a day the money goes out. If you need more time, just say so.
² Email is in profile, you can set up a call with me or send me an email of the contract if you don't want to share the contract publicly.
Everyone should get the same rates with no lock in or out. In media terms if Netflix can stream a movie for $0.40 per stream then every other provider should be able to stream it under the same terms.
Exclusivity agreements are anti-competitive. We've seen them grow unchecked and it's created the same unhealthy relationship between distributors and creators that lead to the forced sale of movie theaters away from the movie studios.
Epic Games is obviously just out to profit more. But this is a war that we all benefit from if they win.
Sure I'd love to see someone like the EFF change this. But the reality is they don't have the funding to go directly against Apple and Google on this. Epic Games does.
Tim isn't doing it for developers or publishers, he wants a piece of the steam pie.
If he was serious about being competition he would come out with a better platform and compete.
When MS came out the windows store, Tim said "they’re trying to force this thing on the industry and it’s woefully inadequate for the tasks they’re trying to serve it for"
https://www.pcgamer.com/tim-sweeney-microsoft-uwp-is-still-w...
Yet, the epic store, was... IS STILL woefully inadequate. They built a terrible store that has no functionality, no currency options, no linux support, nothing more than a front for a dozen games. Then turn around and buy exclusives under the disguise of "we're doing it for developers and publishers, we are the good guys, screw all you gamers out there who don't care!!!"
(I'm aware they have tried to fill some of these features, but they have ALONG way to go)
They could have come out with something better, and been competition, but they have nothing to compete with.
----
Tim also said: "I believe Microsoft has every right to operate a PC app store, and to curate it how they choose."
Tim is now: "Oh Apple and Google shouldn't be allowed to run their own app store how they choose."
Every other aspect of how Epic played this has been brilliant IMO.
Apple is not a monopoly but Apple and Google together have just shown the incredible power they wield.
Android could potentially get pinged for pre-installing Play Market and not offering a choice.
Google Android does.
If a software developer has an issue with the distribution channel, then they can make their own, including the R&D and operate expense for the hardware. I know, really unpopular take. Bigger question is are Apple and Google (with hardware/software ecosystems) deserving of Bell-style regulation? The US already has a playbook for this.
You can choose RC cola or Faygo - always an option. Maybe Faygo offers a great new flavor(no payment fees) and tons of Users see that benefit outweighing other features? That's the market. Make the compelling value prop and you win.
Epic already has a distribution channel, payment processing, the whole 9 yards, what they don't have is anyway onto the hardware that you own.
Epic does have a way onto the phones: provide an easy way for User's to jailbreak them as part of the ingress to the Epic distribution channel.
"In 2010 and 2012, the U.S. Copyright Office approved exemptions that allowed smartphone users to jailbreak their devices legally,[62] and in 2015 the Copyright Office approved an expanded exemption that also covers other all-purpose mobile computing devices, such as tablets"
So all Epic needs to do is assume the cost and investment of managing the inter-dependencies of the hardware with various other pieces of software, including their distribution channel.
That doesn't add up to anywhere near 30%
This is the entire point of the case, that you have little to no alternative.
It will be better for all developers if the gatekeepers lower their rates, but epic really doesn't strike me as a white knight here.
They are of course really hard to make ...
Apple or Google may cave in this particular case because Epic has some leverage with their userbase, but I'd be shocked to see either of them lower the rates for anyone other than Epic. I think it's going to take legislation to fix this.
The app store is a two way street. For most developers, apple can hide behind "no one's forcing you to be on our app store". And they are right, apple doesn't have a monopoly, but they have a lot of users, and what they really have is a lot of users who spend money on their platform. They have the customers you want.
But there is the flip side, which is that apple needs apps to be in the store, and sometimes needs specific ones. For most companies, apple doesn't need your app. The only parties that stand a chance at making waves are those who do control apps apple can't do without, e.g. "what do you mean I can't get Fortnite on my iPhone?"
No one in the situation is gonna be perfect, because at the end of the day, this is a fight for who provides what value and should get what money. It's sort of a Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla situation.
As I wrote in the Apple thread: I think Epic are the ideal entity to do this since - so long as Apple or Google won't actively erase apps from people devices - they already have large install base and it's unlikely to grow much more.
Those who managed to install the latest update are already able to use epic "apple/google tax"less payment system so that protects their revenue for a while.
If either of those para-monopolies start erasing apps from people's phone's that would only add to the narrative that Epic, Spotify, EU et al. are already pushing: these two entities have built a global extractive platform that keeps partners and consumers hostage by their fees.
Epic Games can show just how much the on-going appstore tax prevent new business models from taking hold. They shown an incredible ability to entice people to separate from their money, even convinced Disney?! to partner for branded content.
Alongside Epic Games licensing of the Unreal Engine at-or-below cost (12% [1]), I believe Sweeney's commitment to growing a "Metaverse" market at the expense of Epic's short-term profit.
This comes alongside EPIC(.org)'s comparisons about American vs Chinese & emerging markets competitiveness, linked today [2].
[1]: https://www.matthewball.vc/all/themetaverse [2]: https://epic.org/foia/epic-v-ai-commission/EPIC-19-09-11-NSC...
> The open Android ecosystem lets developers distribute apps through multiple app stores. For game developers who choose to use the Play Store, we have consistent policies that are fair to developers and keep the store safe for users. While Fortnite remains available on Android, we can no longer make it available on Play because it violates our policies. However, we welcome the opportunity to continue our discussions with Epic and bring Fortnite back to Google Play.
Customers are plainly choosing the open platform.
If there ever would be some legal pressure on Apple& Google to open up their platforms, it is important to make this point known to legislators.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Pepper