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US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

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Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#751

Post by kspacewalk2 »

andersa wrote: post #373

It's incredible that there are actually people in this thread arguing in favor of Apple. You don't need to defend the trillion dollar company. They are not your friend, they do not care about you, your work or your life. All they do is steal 30% from society that could be used for more productive purposes than make a few people who already have everything even richer.

What's incredible is the idea that an argument or a point of view is somehow invalidated purely because it happens to side with the trillion dollar company. This is in the same vein as "this cause is supported by teh evil Amerika, hence it must be evil" line of thinking, typically espoused by self-declared anti-imperialists (who are often mere anti-US-imperialists).

>make a few people who already have everything even richer.

I do wonder what percentage of Apple stock is owned by pension funds and the like, i.e. The Regular Person, once you unwind the levels of indirection (mutual funds, index funds, ETFs, etc). It is surely a double digit percentage, but high, low? No idea.

Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#753

Post by throw__away7391 »

andersa wrote: post #373

It's incredible that there are actually people in this thread arguing in favor of Apple. You don't need to defend the trillion dollar company. They are not your friend, they do not care about you, your work or your life. All they do is steal 30% from society that could be used for more productive purposes than make a few people who already have everything even richer.

Who is definitely not my friend is third party app developers who want to side load their trash spamware on to my phone.

Every single platform out there is a dumpster fire of fraudulent and abusive software and products aggressively pushed by deception with every trick or vulnerability they can find exploited.

The App Store works just fine for me as a user as is. I don’t care at all what software you want to install on my phone or what access you feel entitled to.

Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#754

Post by plagiarist »

issafram wrote: post #493
nevir wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a little story / timeline from 2009-2010 (from my perspective as a dev on Kindle for iOS): * we submit the Kindle app ...including an in-app bookstore... to Apple for initial app review (Note: multiple ebook readers with in-app bookstores are already on the app store at this point) * several weeks pass with no response * Apple announces in-app purchasing (to be released several months later) * Apple rejects ou…

I did my first iOS development about a couple of years ago. Question, how in the world do you tolerate the storyboard XML files? One small change in XCode results in so many line changes. PRs are impossible to review with any confidence.

Do everything programmatically. Especially because the XML is not (last I checked) compile-time validated against the symbols it is using.

Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#755

Post by webstrand »

thinkerswell wrote: post #733
andersa wrote: post #373

It's incredible that there are actually people in this thread arguing in favor of Apple. You don't need to defend the trillion dollar company. They are not your friend, they do not care about you, your work or your life. All they do is steal 30% from society that could be used for more productive purposes than make a few people who already have everything even richer.

It's amazing to me that people in this thread still don't understand free markets. You are free to use Android, or Amazon phone. Or Graphene. Or one of the many others.

Apple preventing 3rd party software not paying the apple tax from running on their phones is not "free market". The only reason they can get away with this is because of laws that protect their market from 3rd parties.

Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#756

Post by sharemywin »

remus wrote: post #379
andersa wrote: post #373

It's incredible that there are actually people in this thread arguing in favor of Apple. You don't need to defend the trillion dollar company. They are not your friend, they do not care about you, your work or your life. All they do is steal 30% from society that could be used for more productive purposes than make a few people who already have everything even richer.

I also think apple's 30% cut is excessive, but I don't think this line of argument helps. We should discuss the points on their merits, not based on who's making them and how much money they have.

I think it's kind of the same argument. if you can justify an excessive marketplace tax for a company that "wins" in a wins a winner take all market dynamic then you get a $Trillion company. not sure how you get one without the other.

Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#757

Post by timtom39 »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #751
andersa wrote: post #373

It's incredible that there are actually people in this thread arguing in favor of Apple. You don't need to defend the trillion dollar company. They are not your friend, they do not care about you, your work or your life. All they do is steal 30% from society that could be used for more productive purposes than make a few people who already have everything even richer.

What's incredible is the idea that an argument or a point of view is somehow invalidated purely because it happens to side with the trillion dollar company. This is in the same vein as "this cause is supported by teh evil Amerika, hence it must be evil" line of thinking, typically espoused by self-declared anti-imperialists (who are often mere anti-US-imperialists). >make a few people who already have everything even…

> I do wonder what percentage of Apple stock is owned by pension funds and the like, i.e. The Regular Person, once you unwind the levels of indirection (mutual funds, etc). It is surely a double digit percentage, but high, low? No idea.

Pretty high. The S&P 500 has ~7% apple stock which means many peoples retirement accounts have several percentage points of apple stock.

Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#758

Post by macspoofing »

fallingknife wrote: post #700
slimsag wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be the funniest and saddest thing I've read all year. So $MEGACORP abuses their absolute monopolistic position in the market to underhandedly negotiate with book publishers and force their hand into working the way $MEGACORP wants: in order to gain access to $MEGACORPs completely dominated (but technically not a monopoly*) audience who wishes to buy books in a convenient way online, book publishers must bow…

It's not really comparable because Amazon never did anything to try to stop anyone from buying books through any other channel. The platform they do own, AWS, unlike the iphone, is perfectly open to competitors to Amazon's retail business.

>It's not really comparable because Amazon never did anything to try to stop anyone from buying books through any other channel.

Neither does Apple. Amazon prevents all of their sellers from selling their goods at any sort of discount anywhere else (including through direct-to-consumer channels).

>The platform they do own, AWS, unlike the iphone, is perfectly open to competitors to Amazon's retail business.

It's not apples-to-apples comparison. Here's a better one ... Amazon will gather competitive metrics from sellers on their marketplace (i.e. their 'partners' and 'costumers') and then launch a competing product, undercut them on price, rig their search (to prioritize their product) and ultimately drive them out of business.

Apple is bad, but their terribleness is limited to the Mac-iOS ecosystem ... Amazon is way worse.

Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#759

Post by SLJ7 »

mzs wrote: post #752

Apple just admitted that 3% is the reasonable cost for bandwidth and service related to an online storefront and that their margin is huge.

No, 3% is just Apple accounting for credit card processing fees. It will end up costing developers roughly the same whether they use alternative payment methods or not, which is obviously Apple's plan.

Re: US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

#760

Post by toyg »

remon wrote: post #702
toyg wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It does not matter how much money a company makes or if you personally think they're charging too much for a service. They're allowed to. Ah yes, loan sharks are perfectly legitimate businessmen too, then. > The fact that this is the second highest upvoted comment is a rather sad datapoint I personally find sadder that there are people who just rationalize away the utter lack of morality in modern capitalism. "Why…

Are you being intentionally obtuse? Those two things are, again, completely unrelated. As a person I do feel capitalism in its current form results in demonstrably unethical practices, and I do think Apple overcharges for the value they bring to the table in the specific case of their 30% cut. That's a subjective ethical and moral assessment of Apple as a company. But that's not the topic at hand, and strawmanning on…

> Are you being intentionally obtuse?

For someone lamenting the state of discourse on the internet, you seem to have a problem with avoiding ad-hominems. You also seem to rabidly post multiple items at speed. Please calm down and refrain.

> Ruling on this will not just affect Apple but any company with a similar modus operandi in the future,

Absolutely - and absolutely, anyone creating a digital platform should be forced to follow better rules than what we have at the moment. The market alone will produce exploitative monopolies, and this is what we're seeing with Apple. If the letter of current antitrust laws doesn't touch them, the spirit definitely does.

> Why people have trouble keeping legislative challenges (what you can do) and moral challenges (what you should do) apart

Because it's in the cracks between those concepts that Bad Things for society tend to happen; which is why we have laws to reconcile them where the market fails to do so on its own. In this case, we have large companies effectively establishing exploitative and feudal relationships with smaller businesses and consumers, extracting parasitical rents. This is a Bad Thing and should be fixed.

Including your other comment:

> And yes, loan sharks are legitimate businessmen in the US.

No, they are not. You need licenses to lend money in the US, and to get those you have to follow extensive rules and regulations put in place precisely to make it illegal to be a loan shark. Some businesses get close to the limits of such rules (payday loans etc), and that is a political item - precisely because they get very close to be something that is Bad for society.

> if you want to change it vote for people that can turn that into law

Absolutely, and people do. EU representatives are running with this, and Apple is slowly being subject to more and more scrutiny (together with Google, Amazon, and anyone else with a digital marketplace). People understand that what these businesses are doing is Bad for society in the long run, so if they can't reign themselves in on their own, they will have to be reigned in by the law.

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