Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#401

Post by zepto » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 4:09 PM UTC

anchpop wrote: post #395

zepto wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

TenCent has a stake in Epic but Tim Sweeney still is the majority shareholder

Epic has a 40% stake, and controls Epic’s access to the Chinese market. There may be other rights attached to their share.

Sweeney may technically still have the majority vote, but he can’t do anything they seriously oppose, or not do anything they are strongly in favor of without facing serious consequences.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#402

Post by bergstromm466 » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 4:09 PM UTC

dpkonofa wrote: post #385

pja wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think that's a fair assessment at all. Both Google and, especially, Apple have spent millions of dollars, hours, and effort to create their respective App Stores and the people and tools needed to run them. There's a reason why there's a difference, in the real world, between a Walmart and a Target or Sprouts. Likewise, there's a difference between Apple, Google, or anyone else's App Stores. The main differen…

> Both Google and, especially, Apple have spent millions of dollars, hours, and effort to create their respective App Stores and the people and tools needed to run them.

Google and Apple spent Millions 'claiming' Patents/IP, monopolizing new discoveries, and 'earning' Billions.

"Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction.

Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime." [1]

[1] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#403

Post by rpdillon » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

macinjosh wrote: post #320

kmeisthax wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mal…

> less control over the experience on their platform

I value the customer's ability to install programs of their choosing on a phone they purchased. It seems strange that we see it as desirable to concentrate authority over billions of devices this way. Taking a step back, it's sort of a "what could possibly go wrong" scenario.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#404

Post by ethbr0 » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #392

ethbr0 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tens of billions of dollars building out their respective ecosystem presents a tremendous opportunity to developers That's... one way to look at it. Another way is that they'd be spending even more if there were more healthy competition in the alternative app store market. Amazon is incentived to run an Android app store now, in the same way Microsoft was incentivized to maintain an ARM build of Windows: it's not a…

Amazon made a bunch of poorly performing and uncompetitive Android phones, and then bailed before doing the hard work of actually differentiating their product. The results are totally expected and if anything demonstrate the market is competitive, not anti-competitive. Users don’t want an “alternative App Store market”. They want a place where they know the apps they download won’t steal their data or crash their de…

What would be the hypothetical characteristics of an anti-competitive app store market, to you?

I.e. what would you look at and say "That's anti-competitive"?

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#405

Post by zaroth » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

whimsicalism wrote: post #398

zaroth wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the competition isn’t suppressed, and there’s no actual monopoly here. What we have is a pretty clear case of a minuscule minority of users bitterly complaining that a company isn’t making its products exactly the way they want them to. A store is allowed to charge what it wants for its products. A store is allowed to set the policies that it wants for the goods that it sells in its own stores. It just so happ…

> A store is allowed to charge what it wants for its products. A store is allowed to set the policies that it wants for the goods that it sells in its own stores. A store is allowed to block you from using any other store? These aren't natural continuations or logical extensions of meatspace, stop pretending they are.

This is literally not what’s happening. The iPhone is their product. If you don’t want to use their products and their store you do not have to. Buy a different device. There are plenty.

Apple doesn’t get to tell Google, Samsung, Huawei, LG, OnePlus, Fairphone, etc. how to build their devices.

The one device they do get to decide how it works is the iPhone. Because they created it, they own it, and they get to decide its future.

Their device, their decision. The consumer gets to decide if they like it or not. Overwhelmingly, they decide that they do.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#406

Post by coder543 » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #399

coder543 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re welcome to use App Store apps... I don’t see the problem. Safari PWAs protect your privacy better than native apps, because Safari trusts no one. The App Store review process is trying to find a malicious needle in a haystack because iOS by default trusts native apps more than it should, due to the existence of that nebulous review process. Apple is slowly locking down native apps with each successive iOS vers…

I'm not welcome to buy your app on the App Store though. This seems to be the big disconnect about alternative app stores or distribution methods. It doesn't enable user choice unless every app is available on every store. It enables publisher choice and creates this loop where publishers who have a customer bases just move to the store with the fewest restrictions and fees. It's a race to the bottom where the user l…

> I'm not welcome to buy your app on the App Store though.

If I never release it for iOS at all, you're also not welcome to buy it through the App Store! See how that works? The developer/publisher obviously does get a say in what happens to their app... this is not even slightly shocking. Apple can't force me to develop and release an app for the App Store, which is what you seem to be hoping?

However, there are many publishers competing for your attention. You have a choice, and many of those developers will always choose to use the App Store, since a lot of users browse the App Store. Users vote with their wallets, and developers who don't publish on the App Store would be keenly aware of the uphill battle they might have in convincing users to download their PWA.

> It enables publisher choice and creates this loop where publishers who have a customer bases just move to the store with the fewest restrictions and fees. It's a race to the bottom where the user loses.

Android has supported both sideloading and PWAs with push notifications for many years. Ever notice how the Google Play Store isn't a ghost town? Most Android users still only download apps through the Google Play Store. This is fine -- the users have made their choice, and that's the important thing.

Your doomsday, slippery slope hypothesis of developers vacating the Play Store en masse never occurred on Android. It seems equally unlikely to occur on iOS, unless Apple seriously mismanages their App Store. Still, users and developers should have the choice for meaningful apps to be distributed as PWAs, which essentially requires push notification support.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#407

Post by ryanschneider » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

I really wish they had just said that the tax is 15% on your first $1m in sales and 30% on all sales after each year.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but with the current plan I can actually _lose_ money year over year around the $1m mark. For example if I make $1.01m in year one and then my sales tick up to $1.1m in year two my Apple tax is ~150k in year 1 but balloons to 330k in year 2, leading to a net loss in profits despite a gain in revenue?

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#408

Post by mrtksn » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 4:15 PM UTC

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #386

mrtksn wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's human touch is underrated and I feel like those who complain about Apple's review process have no real world experience and talking from ideological standpoint. I was more than glad to receive a f..g phone call from the reviewer telling me why he will reject my update, why is it this way and what I can do to make it pass and give me his phone number to call if I need further assistance. I become die hard Appl…

I've never heard feedback that good about Apple's app store approval process, thanks for sharing a new perspective! Can you give an idea of the size of the developer account you were submitting for/how established your apps were?

It was my first app ever(the account is registered to my limited company) and it is in the Health&Fitness category. It has some social networking functions and the issue was that the users could start talking with each other without approving the other party, a bit like the chatroulette, and the reviewer explained that the users should be given a chance to choose if they want to talk to this person before they receive the first message. He suggested me, at least to show a profile picture and a name and ask if the users would like to match.

I closed the phone and 5 min later I received the rejection together with the talking points that we went through on the phone.

I also suspect that Apple is trying to make sure that the same app is reviewed by the same employees. I think I dealt with the same 2 people in multiple review issues in later updates.

Sometimes it was frustrating when I have a rejection about something that was previously approved but it was resolved every time when I explain the problem and the solution in the notes to the reviewer section. I think I have a friendly reviewer that sends my updates straight to the store in 6 hours and there's another one who is being hard on me and needs to be convinced every time. Regardless, I am happy to be able to explain things to people.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#409

Post by valuearb » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 4:15 PM UTC

pja wrote: post #301

valuearb wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“In today’s news Apple announced the opening of its iOS platform to allow users to install any apps they want from any alternative App Store. Posters on ycombinator.com denounced the move as a cynical attempt to generate positive PR. Said one, just because Apple has listened to us and stopped doing the evil things we asked it to stop, does not mean we won’t find new things to criticize it as evil for.”

That would actually be a substantive change that would genuinely change the App market dynamics. This ... is not that.

Spoken by someone who is clearly not an Apple App Store developer. If you were an App developer like myself, you'd realize what a huge change this was.

First, most Apple devs don't care about alternate app stores. Those provide nearly zero additional revenues to devs on every platform they are available.

Second, most Apple devs don't want the Apple App Store to lose it's primacy, they realize that it's hugely beneficial to their revenues. The security, the app vetting, the single sign on, single purchase account, and easy subscription management and refund features, is a huge reason that we make far more from the App Store than Google Play, despite Androids SIX TIMES larger installed base. Apple attracts the best app customers and makes them super comfortable with buying and subscribing to apps.

Most Apple developers by far largest concern was the large percentage of revenues Apple took. And they addressed that today.

At 15% we can use App Store purchasing for far more things, and I'm already having those discussions with clients today.

Re: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

#410

Post by pja » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 4:23 PM UTC

Lichtso wrote: post #390

ksec wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How about Gopple?

I tried both ways, but decided that one didn’t quite trip off the tongue as well :)