651–660 of 825 posts
This is very good news. Sadly, there is already quite some backlash, mostly coming from Apple aficionados. And I say "sadly" because it is always sad to see how people would try to defend companies and brands, against their own interests.
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I recently had a change of heart on this issue when the prevalence of fraudulent apps on the App Store was documented[1]. It's hard to argue that Apple is providing significant benefit to either consumers or developers for their 30% cut when they seem incapable of reigning in obvious fraud. In addition, I think Apple pushing subscriptions as a solution for long term app funding (instead of upgrade pricing or other op…
> Overall, Apple has not been a good steward of the App Store. But the question on my mind is: what precedent are we setting by legally mandating what a corporation can do on a platform they solely built? And are we pulling up the ladder after the incumbents have climbed it? It's one thing to mandate how much pollution a factory may leak into a shared water supply. But the Apple app store is not a utility or natural…
Microsoft in the late 1990's and early 2000's was in a similar situation. They abused their position in the PC operating system market in an anticompetitive manner to prevent competition in the browser market[1]. Microsoft built their OS and Internet Explorer, so who has the right to tell them what they can and cannot do with them? It turns out that the federal government and regulators around the world have that right.
This is like asking why regulators have right to prevent Standard Oil from engaging in anticompetitive behavior, given that Standard Oil built their own pipelines and railroads, after all.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
And also if they allowed alternate app stores. I'm find with have a (badly) curated walled garden with arbitrary & whimsically enforced rules if, like a PC, users had alternate channels for obtaining software.
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> For starters, the AppStore is not "good" That is your opinion. There is no merit in this subjective standpoint from a legal perspective unless you're willing to share the metric by which you arrived at this judgement. > the fast/cheap/good thing (while for starters not being some actual "law"), is meant to apply to engineering and not market dynamics That's exactly the context in which I mention it. The iPhone, ope…
> For starters, the AppStore is not "good" That is your opinion. There is no merit in this subjective standpoint from a legal perspective unless you're willing to share the metric by which you arrived at this judgement. You brought up goodness with fast/good/cheap! And you certainly provided zero "metrics" in defense of its goodness, I at least provided my perspective as a customer with a concrete issue . I literally…
China has the great firewall. I'm not an expert on it, but I assume whether Apple allows alternative app stores is entirely beside the point of whether people in HK would be able to download and use a networked app.
>> how is this different than $ACTIVITY, except for one day of the year or in one city? Attention will suddenly be directed towards the less stringent alternative
> I have provided a clear example. HKMap.live
You have not provided an argument as to how more attention, both positive and negative, wouldn't suddenly be paid to the alternative. If Apple allowed alternative apps stores, China could start applying pressure to them. Or, as I previously mentioned, firewall them. Apple, a $Trillion company, caved, why wouldn't a lesser organization?
> It's so weird that you bring up Windows as the alternative to iOS rather than... the Mac
Because Windows was the previous platform that most tech-unsavvy people used, and it was a cesspool of malware. My relatives didn't go from Windows machines to Macs or Androids, they went from Windows machines to iPads. It's those people I have in mind when I make these arguments as to the value of an app store. If there are relevant market metrics that show that I am wrong here, I'm glad to see them. I'm just speaking from personal experience: people who use iOS and Macs don't come to me with the same kinds of problems as Windows users (which I also struggled with for years). Therefore I have a strong interest in not letting iOS become something like Windows.
I also still think that macOS is a more secure OS by design vs Windows, so that may be another reason I'm picking on Windows. And people are constantly complaining about that, too, how their computing platforms are being locked down and will soon be devoid of any freedoms. To me it always sounds like the argument is coming from a place where they see some nefarious villain twirling his moustache and devising schemes to keep the masses in the grip of control. I see an organization of many many humans making engineering tradeoffs to create what are, IMO, extremely impressive devices and systems.
Let me be very clear about one thing:
> Maybe in your eyes that's the exact same thing as "The Purge"
> there's actually a lot of stuff that doesn't cleanly fall between good and "murder level bad"
> the situation on the Mac isn't a catastrophic hellscape and thus doesn't serve sensationalist fear mongering
> There are a lot of obvious options in between "only the AppStore" and "MadMax dystopia where anything goes."
I was very clear that I wasn't comparing the situation with the app store to actual literal murder, but that comparison weaves throughout most of your reply. My point was entirely about the implementation and not at all about the regulated activity.
>> "Ignoring the obvious difference"
I'd be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that maybe the difference wasn't obvious to you, if you hadn't sarcastically quoted that exact phrase in your responses.
Lots of comments around the line of "ok maybe 30% is too much, but we can all agree they offer a valuable service, so what percentage should they take ?" Uhhhh, not a percentage ? Do you imagine AWS billing you a % of your revenue instead of a given price for a given service ? Give a price to be listed in store, to be reviewed, to be downloaded by a user, ... And let company pay what they owe you. Let them pay throug…
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> What’s variable are services that an app may take advantage of, such as push notifications Why are push notifications an Apple service? Wouldn't we be better off moving that into the apps?
So you can receive notifications even when the app is closed.
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I recently had a change of heart on this issue when the prevalence of fraudulent apps on the App Store was documented[1]. It's hard to argue that Apple is providing significant benefit to either consumers or developers for their 30% cut when they seem incapable of reigning in obvious fraud. In addition, I think Apple pushing subscriptions as a solution for long term app funding (instead of upgrade pricing or other op…
> Overall, Apple has not been a good steward of the App Store. I'd go one step further and suggest that neither Apple nor Google are good stewards of the mobile app distribution market, either.
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> I contributed to some of the jailbreak app stores You didn't build or work on an app store. You played with one. Much easier to modify something that already exists than to create something where there once was nothing. > just look at AWS prices to see how much it costs to store and transfer a file on S3 Look, if it's so cheap and easy to do, why is everyone so hell bent on getting onto Apple's? They should just do…
> You really need to cool it with the condescension > But I doubt you even know the costs to run the service so my opinion is that you are speaking from a place of ignorance. > You didn't build or work on an app store. You played with one. Much easier to modify something that already exists than to create something where there once was nothing. That's some impressive cognitive dissonance ya got there, you might want…
> You have no idea how much involvement I had
You're absolutely right. I said "I doubt you even know," not "I know for a fact you do not know," and am willing to be proven wrong. I made an assumption that I'm confident would apply to most people commenting on this story. I don't think I misrepresented it as anything other than an assumption.
Until you show me some receipts I'm going to continue assuming you are not actually privvy to what it takes to run the app store.
> Apple won't let anyone do it themselves
You've misunderstood. People are free to build up a fleet of devices, the OS that runs on them, the backend services that make up the app store, all the customer support channels and tooling, find/hire/train all the employees that keep it running, etc etc etc. Apple can't stop people from trying that. Peoples' problem is that they don't want to take decades to get there, which is what Apple has done... lots of pain along the way, too.
_That_ is part of the value proposition of the app store itself. The app store does not exist in a vacuum.
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Oh I absolutely agree. Like another commenter said below, another similar thing are payment processors fees, but it works because 1. you're free to use another one, or checks, or cash, or bitcoin, or anything else, and 2. the EU has strongly regulated their fees and imposed massive limits on what they can charge in %.
But are they similar? One could argue that Visa and PayPal have a monopoly on payments processed via the Visa network/PayPal credit. Consumers are free to choose another ecosystem, but if they don't, the business is forced to make business with them. Similarly, the consumer can choose to buy an Android (or have to phones/tablets), but if they choose Apple only, the business needs to work with Apple.
Apple is directly competing with Spotify with their Apple Music streaming service. Since Apple has complete control over the iPhone ecosystem, they can set the rules to harm other streaming service, or let their own service completely break the rules.
These anti-competitive rules aren't just about Company A relying on Company B to do business. It's about Company B also directly competing with Company A.