441–450 of 559 posts
“Buying” a game for $0.99 that has repeatable in-app purchases in the hundreds or thousands is not “working” if you ask me. I would love to return to the days where games are “complete” at the time you buy them, with essentially no option to buy gems to make it actually work reasonably.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
GP asked " why software makers should share their revenue with Apple " and said "nothing else" is like that. I was just pointing examples of things that were exactly like that. As for the why: I'm thinking from the point of view of a developer. For me it's all the same. Paying 30% to Apple is the same as paying 30% to Steam or x% to console makers. In practice it doesn't matter if the appliance the user runs my softw…
Well, I don't think paying 30% to Apple is the same as paying 30% to Steam. The former is mandatory, the latter is not. If you don't want to be on Steam, you can put your game in the Windows store/etc, or sell directly from your website. If you don't want to be on Apple's app store, well, too bad, it's the only way to reach 50+% of your potential customers (in the US).
I personally have platforms I simply will not use (or refuse to spend money on directly, like EA's Origin, where I only own/care about C&C) regardless how good of a deal it is.
I've been a freelance iOS app developer for almost a decade. Apple has always operated this way. They have rules that are somewhat vague, and they choose when they want to enforce them and how they should be interpreted. For example: you weren't allowed to show device bezels in app store screenshots for a long time, even though all the major apps did exactly that. If you were a small time developer though you would g…
The press loves app developer David vs Goliath Apple stories. Our now-shuttered startup Gliph brought in-app Bitcoin transfers to the App Store for the first time in 2013. Apple allowed the behavior for seven months before I got a call telling me it had to be removed. Bitcoin was hot enough that our blog post generated a fair amount of press for our little startup. [1] and I also published the company's appeal public…
everybody roots for david vs goliath, but the story would change if goliath was actually defending the little guy.
maybe make in-app purchases cheaper for smaller apps.
or do something to take small reasonable developers under their wing. like first year 10%.
Another thing they could do, sort of the opposite, is to take 30% for smaller apps, but have a published scale as volume increases. presumably with scale apples costs would amortize, and developers would be in for the long haul.
They could also maintain 30% if a particular app has lots of chargebacks, like you would have with abusive apps.
Apple takes a 30% cut of all IAP. Google scrapes info and displays it in widgets above links to the actual content. Google charges trademark holders AdWords ransom to protect searches for their own brands. Amazon kills OSS business models by offering managed OSS services on AWS at an unbeatable cost. Amazon picks off the best performing market place categories with Amazon Basics ‘recommended’ competitors. The list go…
I can use Google Chrome, and still use a non-Google search engine. I can use a Kindle, and still read DRM-Free epubs. Yes, all the major tech companies are engaged in rent seeking. But Apple is the only one that says users must either must pay rent or throw away their hardware. The App Store and its policies are not the problem. The App Store is Apple's store, just like Amazon.com is Amazon's store. But the App Store…
No, I don't want to install your lousy app that's only a front-end to your web service anyway. Of course it gives you more control and opportunity for certain features. This only means that web browsers still have a long way to go. If apps were reasonably small, maybe I could install more of them, but as it is, it's just impossible.
Either way the back-end providers profit.
This is the sort of crappy user experience that Steve Jobs would have railed against. No doubt that he would accept, say, Netflix getting a discount off the standard 30%, but there's no way he would have accepted the status quo where (a) Netflix has a deliberately poor user experience on iOS to workaround Apples rules; (b) Apple gets zero revenue from Netflix.
I've been a freelance iOS app developer for almost a decade. Apple has always operated this way. They have rules that are somewhat vague, and they choose when they want to enforce them and how they should be interpreted. For example: you weren't allowed to show device bezels in app store screenshots for a long time, even though all the major apps did exactly that. If you were a small time developer though you would g…
The press loves app developer David vs Goliath Apple stories. Our now-shuttered startup Gliph brought in-app Bitcoin transfers to the App Store for the first time in 2013. Apple allowed the behavior for seven months before I got a call telling me it had to be removed. Bitcoin was hot enough that our blog post generated a fair amount of press for our little startup. [1] and I also published the company's appeal public…
There's a github link at the bottom. Doesn't look to me like there is any affiliation with Basecamp.
Edit: Your point still stands, however. DHH made it pretty clear when we said they'd burn it all down. (Don't remember the exact quote)
Is it possible to enable in app purchase at a higher rate exposing the "Apple Tax"? In this case show $129 for in app and $99 if you go to this website... Or is that against the TOS?
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So you increase the price of your app by 30 to make up for Apple's cut%. It's called business. It happens all the time in every single industry. If a business' property taxes go up, that cost is passed on to its customers. Why do people think that because something is on a phone that it should be any different?
That's also not allowed. I think Hey would be fine charging $142 a year for a subscription in their app, with a little note below saying "you can get this for $99 on our website, the difference is Apple's cut." In fact, if I understand it correctly, the price in-app has to be the same as the price anywhere else. They're literally not allowed to do what you're suggesting and pass the cost of Apple's fee on to consumer…
Just like Hey doesn't tell its customers what percentage of its fee goes to the water company, or the electric company, or to company travel.
This is how business works.
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Gaming consoles aren't general purpose computers. You're not going to do banking, email your boss, find a lover, or order groceries from them. They're unnecessary leisure commodities. There are also three major consoles, PC, Steam, and a ton of other ways to distribute games. It's a highly competitive landscape. If you want a phone, you've got only two options. DOJ, burn the Apple and Google monopolies to the ground.
I think gaming consoles are general purpose computers. You listed a few things that probably aren't done very often on consoles (although you likely can do them, since consoles have web browsers). But it's also easy to list things that are much better-suited to be done on a gaming console than a smartphone.
This is a contrived point of view, and I'm sure the product managers at Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Apple, and Google would all strongly disagree.
Remember when the PS3 used to be used for super computing? Sony quietly ended that program when they realized that wasn't the business they wanted to be in.
While I agree that Apple should probably relax their rules, this list of "exceptions" is not particularly compelling. The majority of them are companion apps for physical products/memberships for which the rules around in-app purchases do not apply: Tesla, Soho House, Wells Fargo, Blue Cross / Blue Shield, WeWork. Github has a free tier and doesn't require a paying membership to use. Netflix is a digital content app…
Sending email is distribution of “digital content”.
This old game of wobbly semantics to describe “organizing electrons in silicon” is pretty much done isn’t it?
Society has hit an information entropy. Where the masses get one message “austerity” while the elites tirelessly bike shed the rules, struggling to maintain their old epistemology as they die off from natural causes, which is extinguishing their norms instead.
Varoufakis is right: leadership of the old generation is out of net new ideas and has us nickle and diming old ones to keep up the ruse.
Their only endgame, which isn’t driven by more than an intuition, is keep the hierarchy story looking like it did decades ago.
This is just biological survival instinct. There’s absolutely no real reason to carve up “digital content” into more than electrons zipping through silicon, except for financial Machiavellianism.