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Apple apologizes to WordPress, won’t force the free app to add purchases

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Re: Apple apologizes to WordPress, won’t force the free app to add purchases

#281

Post by RonanTheGrey »

bekman wrote: post #217
cameldrv wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably Apple should have nothing to do with this. Someone buys a phone from Apple, and now owns that phone. He wants to use his property to run some software. What should Apple have to do with this decision any more than Chevy should tell me what neighborhoods I should drive my car into?

Not a fair comparison, this’s between developers and Apple, Apple doesn’t change you anything after you buy their phone.

The point is that Apple continues to make decisions FOR YOU after you buy the phone - and we aren't talking about where the settings screen is or the color of the icons, we are talking about who you are allowed to do business with -- and that is anticompetitive.

Just because you want to punt and say it's between the developer and Apple doesn't make it better. The point is that it shouldn't be.

Re: Apple apologizes to WordPress, won’t force the free app to add purchases

#282

Post by thaumasiotes »

bostik wrote: post #250
burnte wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30% of the app price is high, but not insane. They're handling 100% of the distribution, installation, verification, and payment processing. 30% of recurring revenue is highway robbery, because they offer NOTHING to subscription content.

30% cut from one-off payments is highway robbery. On top of that... > They're handling [...] payment processing. That has a tone-deaf shade. This piece of news is particularly volatile because Epic and Apple are now going to court over Apple expressly forbidding a developer doing their own payment processing. These are mafia-like tactics. I've said it before: 30% is way, way too much. A very good agent gets 15%, and…

> During feudalism 1.0 the peasants were raked for 10%.[0]

> 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithe

Since tithes are paid to the church and not the state, this immediately implies the peasants were paying more than that.

Historical tax rates are low, and so is historical productivity. For example, you can read old instructions to tax collectors saying "take everything they don't need to survive -- but no more than that".

So this becomes a question of whether today we're measuring up from the tax rate, or down from the rate of confiscation of surplus.

Re: Apple apologizes to WordPress, won’t force the free app to add purchases

#283

Post by belorn »

bloblaw wrote: post #81
rubber_duck wrote: post #5

Really at this point Apple control over app store is anti-competitive (and Google over play store), having to rely on community outrage to get stuff like this turned is ridiculous. They should create legislation to control access to all app stores to prevent this rent seeking - force app stores to treat all apps equally according to store defined guidelines (including store owners apps) - any submissions have to be r…

> They should create legislation to control access to all app stores to prevent this rent seeking You have a lot of faith in 60+ year old (mostly tech-illiterate men) to fix technology they don't understand. Government isn't the solution to this problem. Developers leaving the app store is probably only what will get Apple to change.

You have users who has iphones, and those users want you to develop an app. They can't switch phones. Buying a new phone is expensive. They use apps that only currently exist in iphone. There is sunk costs. Their social circle require them to use iphone. The phone was provided by the job and they can't use something else.

Should the developer spit in the face of those users and refuse to develop the app? No. They might not like apple. Might not support what apple is doing. The app might be horrible crippled and overpriced. Sadly the choice will still likely be to develop an app for the iphone because the small signal it would send to apple is microscopic compared to the major harm to your users.

Linus tech tips had a nice discussion around.

Re: Apple apologizes to WordPress, won’t force the free app to add purchases

#284

Post by mijoharas »

threeseed wrote: post #9
g_p wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post here exemplifies why apple's behaviour is so problematic - you're left trying to adhere to a set of rules that even Apple can't manage to enforce consistently and correctly, facing the risk of having to pay an unexpected 30% tax on sales (and effectively have to raise prices accordingly). Hopefully this logic is enough to get Apple in bother during their antitrust suits and Investigations - it seems quite i…

It is not a tax on sales. It is the cost of using their channel to market. If you host the app yourself on your website then how are people going to discover it. For most developers they would buy ads or invest in content or influencer marketing. Those marketing costs are your channel to market and obviously aren't a tax. It's hilarious watching so many people on HN discuss this topic who are completely naive and ign…

> It is not a tax on sales. It is the cost of using their channel to market.

Oh cool! I didn't know that, that's really great! I'll just use the other channel to the iOS market then. How do I do that?

Re: Apple apologizes to WordPress, won’t force the free app to add purchases

#285

Post by RonanTheGrey »

slow_donkey wrote: post #25

An issue I haven't seen previously discussed is Apple's enforcement of their "Business" guideline (3.2) which effectively prevents certain b2b apps from making it onto the App Store because the app is supposedly not available to a wide enough consumer audience. This is a very subjective policy because popular b2b apps such as Slack, Zendesk, etc which have a wide reach are allowed, but more industry specific b2b apps…

In the past several years I have used half a dozen apps that were "designed for a specific business or organization" including a VPN app that only works for a large California software company, an account management app that only works for a company that does software contracting (different than the other), among others. The distribution audiences of these are comparatively tiny. So why were they allowed?

Rhetorical question, we know why.

Re: Apple apologizes to WordPress, won’t force the free app to add purchases

#286

Post by thaumasiotes »

Slartie wrote: post #271
mortenjorck wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an allergy to tech analogies in general, but Apple's brick-and-mortar retail analogy is one of the worst. In any locality other than rural towns served by a single Dollar General, consumers have a choice between multiple retail outlets. If they don't like the choices at one store, they're free to shop at another. "But Android!" one might say, and once again, the analogy falls completely flat. The switching cos…

> "But Android!" one might say, and once again, the analogy falls completely flat. The switching costs of going between iOS and Android are obviously not remotely comparable from the switching costs of going between Walmart and Target. When you move into iOS town, the only store within a thousand miles is the App Store. The analogy actually works quite nice, and you already hinted at how: the Android alternative is a…

> that one place you were in did only have one store with very restrictive rules and opening others is forbidden.

See also: certificate-of-need laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need

> Accepting such a monopoly and arguing that "people are free to sell their houses, leave their friends and family behind and move elsewhere if they don't like it" doesn't really make it a monopoly is ridiculous.

If only. CON laws and their analogues form monopolies in the true sense - businesses who are protected from competition by law. But hey, what's wrong with that?

Re: Apple apologizes to WordPress, won’t force the free app to add purchases

#287

Post by tpxl »

simonh wrote: post #266
jayd16 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its crappy but I don't see how a crappy review process is anti-competitive or how improving this aspect would make the situation less monopolistic.

The argument is that the review process gets away with being crappy due to the monopoly position, not that it is leading to the monopoly. It’s a symptom, not a cause. Also it’s possible that specific clauses in the guidelines are anti-competitive. Fir example a guideline that simply disallows any app that competes with one of Google’s Apps might be seen this way. So those are coherent arguments I think, I just don’t…

>The reason customers went with Google Play is simply because it had momentum and scale, and customers don’t want multiple stores.

The reason customers went with the default is mostly because it's the default. Given the choice, we'd see a lot more competition.

>If someone wanted to develop a better store, with libraries better than ‘play services’, what stops them?

The anti-competitive google behavior where they forbid you to sell any android phone with Google Play if you sell any android phone without it? IIRC there was a lawsuit/fine in EU a few years back regarding this.

Re: Apple apologizes to WordPress, won’t force the free app to add purchases

#288

Post by jabirali »

rubber_duck wrote: post #5

Really at this point Apple control over app store is anti-competitive (and Google over play store), having to rely on community outrage to get stuff like this turned is ridiculous. They should create legislation to control access to all app stores to prevent this rent seeking - force app stores to treat all apps equally according to store defined guidelines (including store owners apps) - any submissions have to be r…

> They should create legislation to control access to all app stores to prevent this rent seeking

Thinking a bit wider, the same legislation should affect e.g. how Amazon can treat people who sell on their platform. They are all monopsonies:

“In economics, a monopsony is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers.”

Re: Apple apologizes to WordPress, won’t force the free app to add purchases

#289

Post by microtherion »

scarface74 wrote: post #99
travisjungroth wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not really into congress defining how apps get reviewed. I’d rather see it just get broken up in some way. Either you can’t have a phone and an app store (like the studio/movie model) or they at least have to support other app stores. Side note: my iPhone autocorrected app store to App Store, which I think is another example of overreach.

The studio/movie regulation was overturned....

… and this actually happened about two weeks ago: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.527174...

I wonder how familiar the people espousing an expansive view of antitrust law here on HN are with the actual administrative and judicial state of antitrust enforcement.

Re: Apple apologizes to WordPress, won’t force the free app to add purchases

#290

Post by comex »

nodamage wrote: post #275
commoner wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The matter under contention is the pricing of in-app purchases, not the pricing of phones. By disallowing app stores other than Apple's App Store, Apple is coercing users to pay an inflated price for in-app purchases, since it takes a 42.8% price hike to negate Apple's 30% fee.

Both are relevant, because in order to successfully win an antitrust tying claim under US law you need to prove the seller had sufficient market power in a tying product in order to coerce buyers into buying the tied product. In this case, once you buy an iPhone, you're forced to use Apple's system to make in-app purchases. The tying product is the phone, and the tied product is the in-app purchase. So you need to sh…

Epic's lawsuit does not accuse Apple of tying App Store sales to phone sales. Two of the nine counts are about allegedly tying in-app purchases to app sales, and the rest don't involve tying.

(Neither does Apple v. Pepper.)

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