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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

#961

Post by dns_snek »

gretch wrote: post #876
Mikho wrote: post #714

The real problem with the Apple Tax — it ruins value-chain and makes it uneconomical For every value created a customer receives there is value captured by a company paid by this customer. Let's say a company creates a service valued as 1X by the customer and the customer pays 1X for that. This balance guarantees accessibility and interest among many customers. Apple tax demands for a customer to pay 1.43X for the sa…

I applaud you taking personal action and voting with your wallet / dev cycles. > it ruins value-chain and makes it uneconomical This is empirically not true. If the value-chain is so 'ruined' and 'uneconomical'. Why are there so many iOS devs? Lots of people are participating in the system and lots of people are getting rich. Examples of truly uneconomical ecosystems are Windows Phone and Blackberry - which is why al…

> This is empirically not true. If the value-chain is so 'ruined' and 'uneconomical'. Why are there so many iOS devs?

Survivorship bias. You only see businesses that have high enough margins to eat the fees. Whether that's a desirable set of incentives for long-term prosperity of everyone involved is a different question.

Apple could raise their fee to 90% and there would still be plenty of iOS developers using in-app purchases, because selling a few bytes in a database is effectively free. It would all be trash, but they would definitely be there.

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

#962

Post by chandler5555 »

tcmart14 wrote: post #959
georgeecollins wrote: post #934

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with case (3) there are many companies that would love to be the store / portal that you discover and new purchase apps through (with all the security and testing Apple requires) for less then a 30% cut. But Apple won't let them. It's clearly a price set without competition. Keep in mind Apple sells advertising in the App Store. They make $ beyond just the 30%. Disclosure: I am APPL shareholder and sometimes app…

I'd be really skeptical that there exists companies who would love to be the portal for a smaller cut then Apple. At least longer term. I can see someone, just to get their platform off the ground, trying undercut for a little while. But 30% is sort of like an industry standard. Google takes 30%. There are alternative app stores for Google, but really how prevalent are they and are they really worth mentioning. Ninte…

why wouldn’t microsoft make a portal and do 0%. they get all of the market share and analytics and good will, plus the value of being the main “other” store. they can break even on hosting fees with some ads

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

#963

Post by sccxy »

squigglydonut wrote: post #842

I designed and built my PWA. You just have to define a manifest and set an empty service worker. Boom now your mobile responsive app is a PWA. PWA can look exactly like native app if you are careful with the design. There are navigation patterns that users expect. Make sure to dial in the information hierarchy and design modals correctly. Use familiar iconography and use type that works at small point sizes. This is…

Some recent iOS PWA bugs:

Dark/light mode switching does not work

Wake Lock API does not work

These features work in browser.

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

#964

Post by MagicMoonlight »

Mikho wrote: post #714

The real problem with the Apple Tax — it ruins value-chain and makes it uneconomical For every value created a customer receives there is value captured by a company paid by this customer. Let's say a company creates a service valued as 1X by the customer and the customer pays 1X for that. This balance guarantees accessibility and interest among many customers. Apple tax demands for a customer to pay 1.43X for the sa…

“Supermarkets ruin the value chain, consumers should pay only the grain price”

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

#965

Post by SilverBirch »

Mikho wrote: post #714

The real problem with the Apple Tax — it ruins value-chain and makes it uneconomical For every value created a customer receives there is value captured by a company paid by this customer. Let's say a company creates a service valued as 1X by the customer and the customer pays 1X for that. This balance guarantees accessibility and interest among many customers. Apple tax demands for a customer to pay 1.43X for the sa…

To be honest it sounds like you've swallowed an econ 101 textbook along with a few libertarian talking points. I was just waiting for you wheel out Deadweight loss.

The problem with modelling this as a tax is that... it's not a tax in a pure sense. Apple has partly built the product that you're selling. You're building on their hardware with their libraries and their APIs and their servers and their quality control. They want compensation for that.

Now you can argue what level of compensation is fair, and as you point out, its a free market and you even have an option to use a different technology to build you product. The alternative is that Apple doesn't collect this cut of the profits and you have to actually engage in what that means.

Why would they build APIs for you? Why would they distribute your app at all. What happens for example if we pass a law tomorrow saying "Sorry Apple, you can only collect enough for credit card fees".

Well one option is Apple just closes the store, hires a couple hundred high quality developers and builds out their own library of Apps, take 100% of the revenue. No tax in that situation! But I'm not sure it's a better outcome for developers.

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

#966

Post by msm_ »

SilverBirch wrote: post #965
Mikho wrote: post #714

The real problem with the Apple Tax — it ruins value-chain and makes it uneconomical For every value created a customer receives there is value captured by a company paid by this customer. Let's say a company creates a service valued as 1X by the customer and the customer pays 1X for that. This balance guarantees accessibility and interest among many customers. Apple tax demands for a customer to pay 1.43X for the sa…

To be honest it sounds like you've swallowed an econ 101 textbook along with a few libertarian talking points. I was just waiting for you wheel out Deadweight loss. The problem with modelling this as a tax is that... it's not a tax in a pure sense. Apple has partly built the product that you're selling. You're building on their hardware with their libraries and their APIs and their servers and their quality control.…

>Well one option is Apple just closes the store, hires a couple hundred high quality developers and builds out their own library of Apps, take 100% of the revenue. No tax in that situation! But I'm not sure it's a better outcome for developers.

It's also not better for Apple, quite obviously, or they'd already do this. People want and expect their favourite apps to work on their phones.

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

#967

Post by kalleboo »

dmitrygr wrote: post #178
llm_nerd wrote: post #74

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…

Does a gas station “get away” with charging for gas? They are selling a service and can charge anything they want for it. You are free not to use it, as is anyone else.

> You are free not to use it

I'm not really though. I need to use either an Apple or a Google phone to participate in society.

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

#968

Post by SilverBirch »

msm_ wrote: post #966
SilverBirch wrote: post #965

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest it sounds like you've swallowed an econ 101 textbook along with a few libertarian talking points. I was just waiting for you wheel out Deadweight loss. The problem with modelling this as a tax is that... it's not a tax in a pure sense. Apple has partly built the product that you're selling. You're building on their hardware with their libraries and their APIs and their servers and their quality control.…

>Well one option is Apple just closes the store, hires a couple hundred high quality developers and builds out their own library of Apps, take 100% of the revenue. No tax in that situation! But I'm not sure it's a better outcome for developers. It's also not better for Apple, quite obviously, or they'd already do this. People want and expect their favourite apps to work on their phones.

They don't do this right now because they get revenue from Apps built using their SDKs. If they can no longer get that revenue they may well decide they'd rather just build their own versions and get 100% of the revenue instead, and for everything else just push developers into a web view.

Hell, without the revenue they could just turn around and say "We're not going to charge a 30% fee. But you need to pay us $10m per quarter to license our SDK". There's tonnes of options that Apple can use to squeeze developers for something that genuinely is hugely valuable.

I think people lose sight of the fact that before the App Store the way applications got onto phones was far far more favourable to the hardware vendor.

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

#969

Post by joshstrange »

foooorsyth wrote: post #280
justinclift wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It'll probably need to be another lawsuit since it's in the developer agreement. 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 develo…

>There's literally no choice but to sign the things - regardless of terms - if you want your users to have software that runs. This gets to be a real nightmare in large organizations with multiple Apple Dev Portal admins, some of which may not even be authorized to sign legal documents on behalf of the company.

It's a massive pain when working with non-technical entities. Both professionally and in my side-business I have to do this and it's a horrible experience. I'll pay the damn $99/yr, just let me admin everything for the client. Tracking down the owner and getting them to login and click a button is harder than it sounds and it brings updates (even internal on TF) to a screeching halt.

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

#970

Post by tristan957 »

nodamage wrote: post #914
tristan957 wrote: post #906

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people still think that OJ is a murderer? Courts get rulings wrong all the time. How many times has someone on death row been exonerated for a crime? The App Store is a monopoly by definition. It is the only form of app distribution to 100% of iPhone users. Going further, it is the only form of app distribution to greater than 50% of the US market. Vertical integration is a very valid argument to make here, sa…

> The App Store is a monopoly by definition. It is the only form of app distribution to 100% of iPhone users. That’s not how monopolies are defined under US law, so no it’s not, by definition. It’s always possible to define an arbitrarily narrow market such that one company owns 100% of it. The legal definition of a monopoly requires specific criteria to be met which have not been met in this case.

Why did you leave off my next sentence from the quote? Can you please link to the definition you are using?
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