101–110 of 1001 posts
There's a strong chance this will be shot down as "bad-faith" compliance. Rumor is Epic will quickly contest it [Update: confirmed] https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/174740814726057173...
My eyes glazed over while scrolling the OP's list of restrictions. I'd probably want to sue rather than try to implement all that too.
This feels like a straw that breaks the camel's back kind of moment. Apple has gotten away with a tremendous amount (being an astonishingly greedy company. All companies are de facto greedy, but Apple is just next level in its egregious entitlement), but there is simply zero way this stands. And FWIW, I'm an Apple fan and find Tim S a completely unsympathetic character. But seeing the hilariously absurd lengths that…
If you are are ok with this you should also be ok with Apple taking a cut on anything you buy with their browser, why not also take a fee for any data going in and out of your phone.
The fact that they have a browser and allow “3p browsers” is only because the web was already established and customers wouldn’t have bought in without it.
iPhones and iPads are not general purpose computing devices. Not by tech, but by policy.
This is in response to them losing that part of the Epic lawsuit and exhausting all appeals (SCOTUS denied cert yesterday). It's not a voluntary decision.
It's also not a concession in any way. Depending on the payment method used, they might just make a profit on this (e.g. some cards charge more than 3% of interchange alone, and there's other fees on top).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh absolutely it is. But all app store developers are complicit in enabling that monopoly. What should happen is that all app store developers withdraw their apps until Apple sees the light. But that won't happen because every app store developer will be pitted against their competition in a race to the bottom who will accept the highest fees that Apple is going to impose and sooner or later you'll be back at that 30…
What should happen is that governments regulate these policies out of existence (or into sensibility). We already do this for things like credit card processing fees (in Europe) and it works well.
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It seems a lot more egregious that anything Microsoft did in the 90s. While MS tried to push their own products and lock out competitors, they never tried to take a massive cut of all the software on their OS. The level of sheer FU everyone chutzpah is pretty impressive. They're indeed making quite a joke out of antitrust at this point.
I'm not sure that's a direct comparison. Back then sure you could get shareware but mostly the market was paid boxed software. I can't find a direct source but I remember hearing brick-and-mortar retailers would take even more than 30% of sales. And Visual Studio sure wasn't free. Everything was different though, you'd be paying for your OS upgrades too which doesn't happen on iOS. I agree 30% is crazy, but the marke…
Visual Studio wasn't free, but it also wasn't required. There are a wide variety of ways to develop software for Microsoft OSes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also not a concession in any way. Depending on the payment method used, they might just make a profit on this (e.g. some cards charge more than 3% of interchange alone, and there's other fees on top).
There’s also chargeback risk, which I imagine is quite high for digital purchases.
There's a strong chance this will be shot down as "bad-faith" compliance. Rumor is Epic will quickly contest it [Update: confirmed] https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/174740814726057173...
It'll probably need to be another lawsuit since it's in the developer agreement. Via user lolinder ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39020745 ): > Apple is already pretty clear in its developer agreement [0] that the 30% commission is for "its services as Your agent and/or commissionaire" (Schedule 2 3.4), not for its services as a payment processor. They are contractually allowed to take the 30% fee out of paym…
Mind you, you can be blocked from doing needed Apple dev stuff (eg sign binaries, etc) until you've manually logged into your Apple account and clicked on the "I accept" button whenever they change terms.
This happened to us (sqlitebrowser.org) in recent weeks, as our CI just stopped working one day.
It turns out there was a new developer agreement that needed signing, and until I'd logged in and done that then Apples servers would no longer sign binaries.
There's literally no choice but to sign the things - regardless of terms - if you want your users to have software that runs.
So Apple will be collecting 27% (instead of 30%) for... what exactly? They might just get away with something as crass in a vacuum, but given that the DMA will go into effect very soon, there will be a point of reference in a similar economy, and I don't think it'll be pretty for Apple. US regulators (federal or state; I could see something equivalent to GDPR and CCPA) will be taking a very close look.
> So Apple will be collecting 27% (instead of 30%) for... what exactly? Off the top of my head... - Bandwidth - Running the App Store for users - Marketing the App Store - App review - Security efforts to keep malware off the store - Making App Store optimisation tools for developers There's a lot of moving parts to this. You could argue that none of this is necessary if you sideload, but distribution is worth a lot…
...so with that context in-mind, we don't benefit from - nor really need at all, most of those services you're referring to;
> Bandwidth
We're a small B2B SaaS with a userbase sized under 100,000 users and our old app bundle was around ~20MB and updated a handful of times per year, so even if 100% of our users used the iOS app with auto-updates then that's less than 2GB of data-transfer per published update - the cost of serving that is far less than a rounding-error on AWS/Azure.
> Running the App Store for users
I accept that.
> Marketing the App Store
No-one should be paying for Apple to market their own App Store - and as a B2B SaaS app, Apple would never promote us or do marketing for us.
> App review
I also accept this - but ostensibly this is what your $99/yr developer fee pays for.
> Security efforts to keep malware off the store
This is the same thing as App review; if we look more broadly, then it's better to compare this to Microsoft's Windows Defender which is free, and is funded independently of the Microsoft App Store.
> Making App Store optimisation tools for developers
Again, this is Apple's responsibility to pay for, not ours - and even-then consider that efficient update/patch distribution systems have been around for decades so it's hardly cutting-edge development (e.g. those ~KB-sized binary diff patches for CD-installed games in the late-1990s when we were on dial-up, like EA had for SimCity 3000 or C&C Red Alert 2)
For a B2B SaaS client app for BYOD users the iOS App Store is perfectly fine as a distribution system, and morally I'm fine with paying Apple some kind of fee for the benefits of their distribution system, but Apple has no legitimate claim to any percentage of the subscription fees we get from our users - so what this means is that we can make our app available for free to our users (which is fine, honestly) but (as per my understanding of the rules) we cannot offer any kind of account-management or billing-management for their SaaS subscriptions from within the app which isn't ideal.
I think Apple's main mistake here was deciding that having a single set of rules and fee-schedules/commission/etc for everyone, because the revenue models for exploitative mobile games (especially their gold/gems IAPs) differs massively from my company's unimaginatively dry B2B SaaS client.