Antitrust process is probably the biggest known innovation accelerator in XXI century
"XX"
Fixed. ;)
Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program
231–240 of 671 posts
Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program
#232I’m seeing a lot of positive comments on HN about this: to me it seems to be purely a cynical piece of PR on Apple’s part. They hope to significantly reduce the pressure on politicians to take a close look at their App store practices by significantly reducing the absolute number of developers suffering the full impact whilst taking the minimum possible hit to their revenue. This has nothing to do with “doing the rig…
Of course there might be other reasons to scrutinize big companies like Apple, Google etc. but isn’t the best policy the one you don’t even have to implement because the actors in the market acted beforehand already?
It is when the policy enacted is reasonably close to the one you'd expect from intervention. There are multiple possible outcomes here ranging from this being insufficient progress to enough progress splintered across separate changes (which outsiders don't necessarily see a whole.)
Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program
#233This is sort of backwards from an economies-of-scale perspective. In the normal world, shipping your software internationally is something of a cost (like filing VAT in all the countries). And even though Stripe has made it way easier to do billing, a small company still would need some servers to do updates, customer service, etc. These things have a cost in time, people, and development.
For an Epic-sized business these things are somewhat small. These costs go down as a percentage of size, not up. So it's almost as if Apple is saying that "bigness" can only happen as a consequence of being on their platform, which I think most people would disagree with.
The attractive thing here is that it is now in Apple's interest to "grow" a bunch of indie developers into bigger companies.
Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program
#234I’m seeing a lot of positive comments on HN about this: to me it seems to be purely a cynical piece of PR on Apple’s part. They hope to significantly reduce the pressure on politicians to take a close look at their App store practices by significantly reducing the absolute number of developers suffering the full impact whilst taking the minimum possible hit to their revenue. This has nothing to do with “doing the rig…
It's along the same lines of what Microsoft did when they were being investigated as a monopoly: throw a bone to smaller developers (or in Microsoft's case, kids in school) which actually just grows their market share (in Microsoft's case, kids learn to use Microsoft products and take that to work, in Apple's case, more devs see profitability in the Mac garden). > Apple / Google’s 30% take is the anti-competitive ele…
Should that work in that way on desktop also? With Microsoft/Apple being free to restrict apps to their store only, and taking a cut of every transaction made outside the browser?
If not, what's the difference with phones/tablets?
Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program
#235I’m seeing a lot of positive comments on HN about this: to me it seems to be purely a cynical piece of PR on Apple’s part. They hope to significantly reduce the pressure on politicians to take a close look at their App store practices by significantly reducing the absolute number of developers suffering the full impact whilst taking the minimum possible hit to their revenue. This has nothing to do with “doing the rig…
And/or are you cynically interpreting this as a piece of PR to rake in the karma? Nearly every act by every person or institution can be interpreted as a cynical attempt to curry favor. Who gets the benefit of a doubt and who gets condemned?
This is clearly a direct result of Epic's lawsuit. I wouldn't consider it a cynical attempt to curry favour if they had done it a year ago.
Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple/Google's 30% take is a tiny baby elephant in the room. Apple and Google have a model where they make lots MORE money outside the system and if the price of software is ZERO they would be happy. In Apple's case, even free software sells their phone. In Google's case, even free software funnels users to their ad platform. [1] "Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements." 1: https://www.joelons…
Apple has no growth left in selling phones. They are now a “services” business. Their most lucrative service so far is the app store. That 30% matters to them a lot.
"no growth left in selling phones" is kind of the wrong way to look at it. Even if their number of units sold per year never grows, it's a very healthy revenue stream because they manage to convince existing customers to buy new hardware. Considering the cost per phone the revenue per customer is pretty high just from selling phones if they can get them to buy every 2-3 years.
Naturally, the 30% take from the app store is bigger, but that's a matter of overall volume, not growth. The app store is a cash cow and will remain so even if its numbers start trending down.
Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program
#237Looks nice but it doesn't solve my fundamental problem: 1. I invest loads of time and effort developing an app 2. Apple rejects it -or- 2. Apple approves it 3. I ship a new update 4. Apple rejects the update and now decides my app should have been rejected retroactively. I'm especially concerned about what happened to Hey and others but my customers are demanding smartphone apps and there are still limits to what can…
More reason to make PWA and keep everything in HTML5 if possible.
Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it was trivial they would not bring Fortnite to Play Store at all, but they did.
Being trivial in difficulty doesn't ensure that people want to do it, especially for a free app. If you want a better experiment, have a play version with normal fees, and a sideload version where v-bucks are cheaper.
Previous they did not have a Play Store version at all. If someone wants to play, they HAD to sideload. And people still don't do that.
Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program
#239When will Google drop its 30% rate?
Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program
#240Their M1 would begin antitrust headaches, as they top every market using a SoC (i.e. increasingly, everything), but are protected by their premium pricing: they'll make the most profit, but not the most sales.