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Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

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371–380 of 671 posts

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#371
There’s a sleight of hand going on here.

Apple is saying that most developer teams make under $1M so this will help them (which is true and great for those teams!). I’m sure most make $0

But what is being missed is that the majority of purchases are done by teams making more than $1M like Spotify and Epic.

For Apple, this concession appeases a lot of angry devs, without giving up a lot of money. I’d wager that most operations struggle to hire a full team and make ongoing product updates for less then $1M of revenue

And of course the actual problem with the App Store isn’t the 30%. It’s Apple’s control and ability to make and enforce arbitrary rules on a whim - as evidenced by today’s changed.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#372
post #246

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…

> Appoogle

I did a search on Google and nothing really came up. Did you just invent the term? I love the name. It might end up in Main Stream Media soon.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#374
post #173

I’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…

This news doesn't mean people shouldn't continue to put pressure on Apple and legislators to address the core issue (app store competition), but it's still really good news for small developers. It should also solidly put down all of the arguments we were seeing about whether indie devs and lawsuits putting pressure on Apple and legislators are at all worthwhile. A drop in app fees by 15% is a substantial win, and th…

> The number of hot takes I was seeing about how the Apple/Epic fight benefited literally no one and it was just two companies arguing about who got to take all the money...

Most of the people I saw who I knew using these takes had a substantial vested interest in Apple prevailing, so I doubt it'll change their opinion.

It's good news unless it diffuses the momentum for more.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#375
post #21

Looks 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…

Step 5. Apple copies your app and integrates it as an iOS feature

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#376
post #173

I’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…

Did Apple do this for craven self interest? Yes. Does it benefit a lot of people who deserve it? Also yes.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#377

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…

> Seriously, who cares if Epic earns 14 bzillionty dollars this month, or 20 bzillionty dollars? The narrative here is amazing, because you're not sympathizing with Epic because they're so big and have so much money... but they're still the little guy compared to Apple. The scale of Apple's monopoly profit makes Epic look like a corner pharmacy in Montana.

Epic is part of TenCent which is close to having a monopoly on games these days.

But separately, the only reason to root for ‘the little guy’ is if the little guy is somehow hard done by.

We dislike the fact that Apple makes some money by charging developers 30% for payment services, software delivery, and operating a storefront that users feel safe to buy from.

We say 30% is too much to change for that, because the margin is way too high. Fair enough.

Epic on the other hand makes its money from selling in game currency to children.

That practice needs to be banned altogether.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#378
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the whole point of antitrust regulations is that > Both Apple and Google are fully within their rights to charge whatever they want within their app store and enforce whatever capricious whims they like on apps that they distribute. actually isn't always true - especially when it hurts consumers. of course it isn't up to us here to decide if it does. remember that private doesn't mean unregulated.

> of course it isn't up to us here to decide if it does I also think it shouldn't be up to courts. It should be up to the consumers themselves. They generally seem quite happy with Apple and Google. On the other hand, if there is a consumer need that is not being met by Google or Apple, it is a prime opportunity to disrupt the market with a new offering that fulfills that need. If Google or Apple stamp that out or ha…

Well glad we live in a country with laws and not a pseudo-libertarian "all governance by consumer choice" world.

Regardless of what you think "should" happen, the reality is that you massively understated the scope of the applicable law.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#379
post #348
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the whole point of antitrust regulations is that > Both Apple and Google are fully within their rights to charge whatever they want within their app store and enforce whatever capricious whims they like on apps that they distribute. actually isn't always true - especially when it hurts consumers. of course it isn't up to us here to decide if it does. remember that private doesn't mean unregulated.

Just look at what Apple has accomplished in the meteoric rise of the iPhone. This is strong evidence of a company that is competing like hell to keep and grow its customers base. “Hurting consumers” would be an almost Orwellian characterization of the smartphone technology revolution driven predominantly by the competition between Apple, Samsung, Google, Huawei, etc.

> a company that is competing like hell

The problem is when by "competing like hell", you compete so hard that you suppress your competition. The issue that anti-competition laws seek to redress is the suppression of other competition.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#380
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree the rules are often inconsistently enforced, and I'm a fan of iSH, I think the real surprise is it was ever approved in the first place, as it seems to clearly be violating the "spirit of the law" regarding Apple being pretty clear they don't want apps that allow arbitrary binary execution. iSH tried to circumvent this with a technicality, and it seems to have initially "worked", but I think it's a poor…

I worked on the iSH appeal, and have of course watched this space for years, so I've gotten very familiar with the "spirit of the law" to the point that the conversation with Apple ended up really being a confirmation that our interpretation of the law was correct and that iSH was fine under the rules that Apple enforces. Your characterization isn't quite right. Apple doesn't want to not have apps that allow users to…

Hmm, that's fair. I don't use iOS much myself, so I'm not very familiar with what's available on the App Store. It does appear that at least Swift Playgrounds allows for projects (including code, which is interpreted) to be downloaded off the Internet, extending the runtime beyond what is available "at time of review".

That said, briefly looking over some scripting/IDE environments not from Apple, it looks like most of them ship "batteries included" and don't allow for content to be pulled from online.

It seems to me the equivalent of iSH shouldn't be, say, a Python interpreter/IDE, but a Python runtime including pip and the ability to pull modules from pypi.org.

OTOH, Python itself is so reflective, I imagine there's probably some way to self-inject modules within a script, if you have any sort of web access. And since you can tunnel TCP over DNS, even a hostname lookup is enough. So I'll conceded the point, since most scripting runtimes probably have some kind of EVAL routine to invoke the interpreter, or a porthole into the interpreter's bytecode.

That said, my own original point was about developers/businesses feeling uncertainty about Apple's rules, and worrying if an app would even be accepted. I feel like almost any developer would instinctively thing iSH's premise of being a program interpreter for the Linux ABI would be rejected by Apple.

Whether or not the underlying rule is fairly applied aside, it's clearly something Apple wants to prohibit. Albeit, I'm kind of baffled myself at why, especially in iSH's case where the emulated runtime is completely separate from the "real program text", with no escape hatches out IIRC. Seems utterly ridiculous to me, especially when you can accomplish something similar in WebKit/JSC I'm sure, just not offline. :-/

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