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Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

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Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#311

Post by LeonB »

pja wrote: post #246
indigochill wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Appoogle are a duopoly. You can’t get significant sales on mobile phones without going through their respective App Stores, which both charge 30%. What a coincidence! Your comparisons with book publishers are specious: if I write a book today I can go to any of a number of publishers, none of whom have any kind of control over access to readers. Or I can even self-publish and sell direct. Jailbreaking is a complete i…

Amazon will pay a pittance for ebook sales unless you’re exclusive with them, and they’ll generally use their market leading position to limit your choices at every step.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#312

Post by sneak »

valuearb wrote: post #304
sneak wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I am misunderstanding, I believe you will be making 21.4% more money? (70% share of revenue -> 85% share of revenue)

Even better!

Not for users who wish to use the macOS without engaging in Apple's services business.

It's already impossible on iOS, due to the fact that you cannot install any software except via the App Store, which requires an Apple ID.

At the moment it is possible to continue to use a mac and download and run software without an Apple ID, but if the trend of only releasing software via the App Store continues, that will become more and more difficult.

Even totally free apps in the App Store require that you identify yourself to Apple to download and use them.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#314

Post by ukoki »

Even from a purely selfish perspective, Apple should have been doing this all along. As a platform, Apple has an incentive to prevent any one app in any one market grabbing monopoly, because the app maker will have too strong a negotiating position (eg WeChat). "Progressive taxation" of app makers will help subsidise smaller app makers giving them an edge vs entrenched large players.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#315

Post by beagle3 »

kmeisthax wrote: post #300
wokwokwok wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they can convince regulators they will self-regulate... while continuing to get a third of the revenue from all the most lucrative developers. So what? Seriously, who cares if Epic earns 14 bzillionty dollars this month, or 20 bzillionty dollars? At that scale, the 30% is such a terrible thorn in your side? Come on. Cry me a damn river. The 'narrative' here is Epic pretending they care about anyone except themselve…

Provide an officially-sanctioned way to install alternative software sources. macOS has that; Apple will even certify third party developers so that the system can still validate software outside of the Mac App Store. That kind of security model would be perfect for iOS and would moot pretty much all the substantive parts of Epic's complaint.

They have an officially sanctioned way. Reinstall every 7 days without cost, or pay $100/year and you don’t need to reinstall.

It’s not as convenient as the main store, of course, but there are convenience tools (altstore.io) that make it close.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#316

Post by AriaMinaei »

graeme wrote: post #296
kqvamxurcagg wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to agree you. It's intolerable that Apple has been allowed to lockdown their device for 10 years, completely control the market for apps and when it looks like regulators will take action they reduce their price and claim to be acting in the interest of small business. Third party app stores must be allowed. Apple should not be allowed to dictate what software I can and cannot have on my device.

Why not get another device? Third party app stores break the security model for regular users. Smartphones have seen explosive growth because normal people can use them safely.

> Why not get another device?

This advice would work for clothes/home appliances/furniture and other competitive markets, but not to mobile OSes.

Mobile OSes are natural monopoly/duopolies. There isn't enough room in the world for 100 OSes for us to get a competitive market. There isn't even room for 3. There is barely room for 2 with great downside. Companies spend a lot of money developing an app for one OS and basically re-creating it for the other.

I'm looking at my phone's home screen. Most of these apps are available in the other OS too, with almost the exact same functionality, but completely different codebases. Each of these duplicate efforts represent anything from X×100K $ to X×10M $ of development cost. This is just part of the cost of having more OSes. And the consumer ultimately pays for these costs.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#317

Post by todd3834 »

Anyone who thinks this is just a PR move doesn’t know what it is like inside the walls of Apple. They truly care about developers and they love indie developers. To me this sounds like they took the feedback they were getting from big players pretending to be standing up for the little guy and realized they had a point. Even though the feedback was delivered in the most hostile way they still saw that small businesses could use a break. This also gives small businesses a chance to afford 15% more in cost per acquisition so it is a little easier to compete with big businesses with larger budgets. Thanks Apple!

Disclaimer: I used to work for Apple years ago

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#318

Post by breakfastduck »

q3k wrote: post #56
lilyball wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple provides value to both end-users and developers. It does not seem unreasonable to charge them both. And if Apple did not charge developers, that would suggest they’d have to raise prices on end-users to make up the difference, which does not seem fair to the users.

If that is the case, are we going to see device price hikes after this cut decrease? Apple can afford to not make 15%/30% off of developers. They are just greedy for short-term profit, as any publicly traded company is. The only reason this cut happened is because they started getting threatened with lawsuits, so they had to slightly slow down their free money printer.

Just because they can afford not to take it doesn't mean it's free

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#319

Post by grishka »

phn wrote: post #310
grishka wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even the 30% cut itself. It's the inevitable necessity to go through Apple if you want any presence on iOS. The only solution I see here is to allow proper sideloading. Apple keeps trying to spin the app store as a way for users to discover apps, when in reality, the reason developers publish their apps there is that it's the only way onto the millions of iOS devices worldwide.

Making it hard for the regular joe to pirate apps is a big part of apple's allure me as a developer. Your app/game won't be 24h on the play store without the apk popping up on some random site, ready to be downloaded. I don't see a way to do proper sideloading without opening this avenue. Maybe a mac os style notarization scheme, but apple gets a lot of flack for that too.

You can't have it both ways. Either it's as closed as iOS and apps can't be pirated, or it's as open as Android and it's possible to pirate apps. Restrictions on what can be installed and user's ultimate control of their own device are mutually exclusive.

That said, I'd choose to have control, even as an app developer. Piracy is a fact of life.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#320

Post by macinjosh »

kmeisthax wrote: post #300
wokwokwok wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they can convince regulators they will self-regulate... while continuing to get a third of the revenue from all the most lucrative developers. So what? Seriously, who cares if Epic earns 14 bzillionty dollars this month, or 20 bzillionty dollars? At that scale, the 30% is such a terrible thorn in your side? Come on. Cry me a damn river. The 'narrative' here is Epic pretending they care about anyone except themselve…

Provide an officially-sanctioned way to install alternative software sources. macOS has that; Apple will even certify third party developers so that the system can still validate software outside of the Mac App Store. That kind of security model would be perfect for iOS and would moot pretty much all the substantive parts of Epic's complaint.

Just because it is something YOU want doesn't mean we ALL want it. I appreciate Apple's review of apps and their store policies. While no human endeavor is perfect it is at least an attempt to keep their platform more secure, safer for kids, higher quality, and more trustworthy.

Opening up the platform to other app stores means they have less control over the experience on their platform it opens more avenues for malware.

If you want a more open platform use Android.

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