571–580 of 851 posts
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Invoice developers for using their intellectual property? How dare Apple expect a revenue share from developers who use their tools and libraries. Companies that make tools and libraries should be forced to give them away for free. Like Unreal Engine. Completely free, no exceptions.
They charge royalty on revenue
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This exchange appears to be open admission of unapolegtic, monopolistic behaviour. Also, the suggestion that customers want it to stay like it is is a flat out lie given his preceding statement where he admits they've never offered the choice, so can't possibly know.
It’s really interesting to observe the way that we can all read that exchange with different interpretations. I don’t see the conflict you’re pointing to at all— to me, it makes sense that Cook can say users don’t want to navigate multiple stores if they had done, for example, focus groups. Meanwhile the experiment that he didn’t want to run is whether users could distinguish between good quality app stores and bad q…
My second question would be, are focus groups equipped to make a decision for potentially billions of users (given the sheer volume, and that focus groups are cherry-picked)?
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S3 is actually quite pricey. Not as much on the monthly storage (tho it can be depending on size), but network egress is really where they get you. On the scale of the App Store where the app might be 100mb but it gets downloaded potentially millions of times it gets expensive fast. Now imagine your app is free. Yet you have to pay for all these downloads. There wouldn’t be any free apps anymore.
At $0.05 per gb transfer, it would be half a penny per 100mb app download. Someone has to pay for that - at the moment Apple subsidises the free apps, presumably because they think they are good for the ecosystem. Although lets be honest here, free apps could easily continue to be subsidised by Apple in any future model. We are talking about far less than a dollar per iPhone in terms of hosting/bandwidth costs for al…
That's including AWS's insane profit margin, though. I have my cloud deployments with Hetzner, where extra traffic costs € 1.19 per TiB, so that 100 MiB app download would not be half cent, it would be 1/100th of a cent. (And that's before we consider that Hetzner gives 20 TiB per month free traffic with every VM.)
> “IAP helps Apple efficiently collect a commission” — for payment processing, but also customer service and the use of Apple’s intellectual property. Without in-app purchases, “we would have to come up with another system to invoice developers, which I think would be a mess.” If Apple let developers tell users about other payment methods, Cook said later, “we would in essence give up our total return on our IP.” App…
> If Apple let developers tell users about other payment methods, Cook said later, “we would in essence give up our total return on our IP.” Apple believes ("insists"?) that they deserve a cut of your app's revenue--however you might collect the money--because your app is using their "IP" in the form of all the libraries and tooling they nigh unto force you to use to build apps that run on their phone; like, to them,…
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Why is that weird? Facebook has to put warnings in the browser console to prevent people from pasting malicious code that some viral post said would give them super powers on Facebook. Obviously these warnings aren’t for people who understand developer tools and internet security. They’re there because malicious people trick other people into running malicious code.
It's not weird because it didn't happen.
People can follow the most complicated step by step instructions if they're explained clearly enough, by someone they feel they don't need to trust, and there's an incentive to follow them.
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AWS pricing is extremely thorough and not at all comparable with Apple's App Store: - AWS charge you on bandwidth used, Apple don't charge developers for the number of downloads - AWS charge you on compute time, Apple don't charge you for ongoing use of their services beyond one initial charge for app submission - AWS charge you for storage, Apple don't charge you for storing your app I'm not a fan of Apple's App Sto…
The point is that while Apple doesn’t charge like that, they could .
Sure, the App Store "could" follow AWS's pricing model, but it makes more sense for it not to given the App Store is more analogous to a shop like eBay or even a physical store like Argos than it is a cloud computing data centre.
This is why I said the AWS/App Store comparison isn't apt.
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Your comparison lags. There are food regulations yet there are a lot of stores where I can buy food. I trust the government to impose regulation on food manufacturers but I trust vendors with their selection of manufacturers. Why should the store landscape on iOS be any different where I put my trust in the store? This would actually mirror my food shopping as well. I trust my vendor, why would this not translate to…
This argument lends itself to constantly shifting goal posts. The moment Apple (the food safety authority) closes down a store for a breach of standards it has enforced, people will simply say that Apple is engaging in censorship, or not being open enough with its platform, or engaging in anti competitive behaviour. The issue is compounded by imagining that the food safety board ran its own restaurant. It then closes…
Tim Cook's line of argument seemed a bit weird to me. On one hand he's saying that he doesn't know if Apple's customers would be able to distinguish between Apple's good and holy curated store and Epic's filthy shitheap of porn and blackjack, but he's also saying that Apple's customers definitely want Apple's App Store as-is. > Lawyer says, “if people really value Apple’s curation and Apple’s App Store, even if there…
There's nothing weird about it. If there were no food regulations, I don't know if I'd be able to pick restaurants and grocery store brands that were safe to eat. But I definitely know I want safe food to eat. Most people want safe food but they want the government to figure out what that means. Same thing here -- most people just want a safe app store. They don't want the work of having to figure out which app store…
> most people just want a safe app store
We already have an example of how users behave when there's a platform that has a default app store and the ability to install others: only a tiny fraction of Android users sideload apps at all, much less install other stores. Users who don't want to think about which app stores are safe simply won't; they'll use the default one.
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But then Epic will have detailed instructions on how to sideload apps, and if enough apps do this it will be common practice for users to do so. If users are trained to do this by safe apps, they won't be on the lookout for the malware that does the same thing.
Maybe a wacky idea, but what if Apple required you to go to an Apple store to sideload a new app or app store. That way the person at the store can stop really stupid mistakes.
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If there were two, or ten, food safety inspection groups, we could figure out which ones had trustworthy ratings. No need for end consumers to inspect every restaurant (every app) individually. That's what Epic is asking for - to have its own app store on iOS.
Which is exactly what everyone wants to avoid. Imagine if there were 10 inspection groups, but sometimes they get bought by corrupt investors who let standards slide while pocketing the extra profit, and consumers constantly have to stay on top of which food inspection groups are the current OK ones and which aren't, and restaurants can't afford to get inspected by all 10 so they only do 2 but then people who only tr…
Much like a government can create quality standards and then outsource parts of its missions to private sector.