What has changed here, it isn't very clear to me from the link.
It sounds like webapps now will open the browser like a bookmark and not open full screen.
PWAs are just websites right, so will they still work in the browser?
It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU
301–310 of 329 posts
Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s really weird because Flash existed on Android, and it sucked. Even the hardcore anti-Apple fanboys were unwilling to defend it much at the time because everyone knew how much battery and RAM it used, and how poorly Flash content designed for desktop screens and controls worked on phones. I don’t love how other things were locked down, but losing Flash for the open web was an unabashed win.
It sucked but a lot of things on early android sucked. Browsers were a moving target in general for the first few years. I don't miss it (well, outside of my childhood web games. But much of that has been preserved or ported), but I sure don't hail Apple as a hero for accelerating the downfall. I think the biggest issue here is that even a decade out there haven't been true flash replacements in some sectors of tech.…
Another way of looking at that would be that the dead-end of Flash held the market back for 5 years. I miss the ease of the simple stuff but the support I had to give friends who got stuck in one of the pitfalls Adobe didn’t care to fix left me happy to move away. It does make a great what-if scenario, though, imagining how it might have gone if Adobe had felt any obligation to support their platform.
Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably because Unreal Engine doesn't support HTML5 games? They did the next best thing, which is to sideload the app that UE can build.
So no major app developer has been motivated enough to create a PWA to avoid the “Google tax” even though the experience is suppose to be so much better on Android?
I don't get the point you're trying to make, nor do I understand your framing.
Historically using the first-party app stores for distribution & payment processing has been more profitable than doing those things on your own. The second it isn't, people won't use app stores anymore. There's nothing intrinsically good or bad about any of these technologies. They're all a means to an end - profit.
We are headed into the next era of mobile apps. Developers who initially found the app store taxes appropriate during the smartphone boom, are now looking to renegotiate the terms as the market stabilizes. There isn't enough growth to go around anymore and make everyone's shareholders happy, so everyone in the supply chain between developer and user will go to war over what's there and what's fair.
This will slowly pick apart all the unjust contracts preventing developers from pursuing alternatives. And as these contracts fall, other distribution technologies will gain momentum. It may be other app stores installing apks and ipas onto phones, it may be PWAs. It doesn't really matter.
Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
So no major app developer has been motivated enough to create a PWA to avoid the “Google tax” even though the experience is suppose to be so much better on Android?
I don't get the point you're trying to make, nor do I understand your framing. Historically using the first-party app stores for distribution & payment processing has been more profitable than doing those things on your own. The second it isn't, people won't use app stores anymore. There's nothing intrinsically good or bad about any of these technologies. They're all a means to an end - profit. We are headed into the…
You still don’t get it. If you look at the vast majority of money made in the App Store - 90% of it is casino style games with in app purchases. The app stores are used by those developers because they have direct access to the users wallets. No accepting credit cards outside of the App Store is not the answer.
There are plenty of ways to fund App Store purchases that don’t involve credit cards and parents aren’t going to give their kids their credit card numbers.
The other big revenue source from mobile - doesn’t involve money going through the app stores at all. They are services surfaced through apps where users already don’t pay through the App Store - like Netflix, Spotify, Microsoft office and all of the B2B apps.
Neither Apple nor Google care about the little Indy app developer.
You keep talking about “unjust “ fees. I’m talking about developers of casino style games that make almost all of the money in the App Store - this came out in the Epic trial.
It’s not about the little guy - no one cares about the little guy - including Apple.
Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Epic Games does it. Amazon does it. Here's some featured apps on the Fire tablet app store: Minecraft, Paramount+, Roblox, Netflix And how is that relevant for phones? > Yes, because you've already made the native app while a PWA is a very different platform. It's usually hard to justify a shift to such a different platform unless it saved you a lot of time by, for example, covering all major and popular platforms…
> And how is that relevant for phones? Epic Games makes and publishes games for phones. Fire tablet apps and its app store are just Android apps, it's just that Amazon doesn't sell phones so they don't brand it like that. > A 30% savings in the cost to go after 70% of the market is not enough of a motivation? New games/apps are coming out all of the time. Why not do web first if web technology is good enough and capt…
> Epic Games makes and publishes games for phones. Fire tablet apps and its app store are just Android apps, it's just that Amazon doesn't sell phones so they don't brand it like that.
And Amazon also takes a 30% cut…
> Profit margins on B2B are generally way higher than B2C, the way B2C companies typically achieve high profitability is via ads on valuable content which is a tough ask for smaller companies.
Where are all of these non game B2C companies that are using in app purchases? Which I keep repeating, can’t make up more than 10% of the total revenue of App Store profit?
In today’s market, if every single app that monetizes directly through in app purchases that was not a casino style game left the App Store, it wouldn’t make a difference.
Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
You still didn’t answer the question - if it means so much for developers, why not use PWAs on Android today?
Because PWAs are not capable enough. But as I repeatedly said and will repeat again: it's not about today. What's true today doesn't need to be true in 5 or 10 years.
So any day now it’s going to be the “Year of the PWA”?
And in that case it’s not just mean old Apple keeping PWAs down?
Also, casino style, pay to win games won’t leave the app stores - which make up 90% of App Store revenue - because of the direct access to users wallets. People are not going to randomly put their credit cards on every website and parents aren’t going to give their kids credit cards to put on those websites. The app stores give parents control of how much spending their kids do.
Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And how is that relevant for phones? Epic Games makes and publishes games for phones. Fire tablet apps and its app store are just Android apps, it's just that Amazon doesn't sell phones so they don't brand it like that. > A 30% savings in the cost to go after 70% of the market is not enough of a motivation? New games/apps are coming out all of the time. Why not do web first if web technology is good enough and capt…
> Epic Games makes and publishes games for phones. Fire tablet apps and its app store are just Android apps, it's just that Amazon doesn't sell phones so they don't brand it like that. And Amazon also takes a 30% cut… > Profit margins on B2B are generally way higher than B2C, the way B2C companies typically achieve high profitability is via ads on valuable content which is a tough ask for smaller companies. Where are…
First of all, it's not 10%, it's closer to 30% [1].
Estimates put 2022 App Store profits at ~$60B [2], 30% of $60B is $18B. Are you arguing that losing a portion of $18B doesn't matter?
$2B of those profits alone is more than any company I've worked for makes in revenue. It's also a lot of money for any company to be losing. If you're the type of business leader who's cavalier about a billion here or there, more power to you I guess.
> And Amazon also takes a 30% cut…
For the first $1MM it takes 20% (Apple offers 15%) but it offers 10% back in AWS credits, it's hoping the AWS credits are attractive.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/10/apple-vs-epic-70percent-of-a...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/10/apple-app-store-revenue-upda...
Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What does this have to do with what I wrote? Everything, really. ActiveX and Flash were proprietary runtimes, which is a real example of a domination play. To my knowledge, Chromium doesn't feature anything that couldn't be reverse-engineered or conditionally re-implimented by third-parties. Maybe some things are nonstandard, but if there's user demand for it then why complain? The native iOS runtime clearly isn't…
> Everything, really. Nothing at all, really > To my knowledge, Chromium doesn't feature anything that couldn't be reverse-engineered or conditionally re-implimented by third-parties. To your knowledge. It's just Chrome-only Chrome-specific code inside a 50-million-line codebase that may or may not depend on very Chrome-specific things. > Maybe some things are nonstandard, but if there's user demand for it then why c…
This thread isn't about the one-sidedness of Apple's criticism. It's about criticizing Apple, and you're deciding to derail it with an unrelated strawman arguement.
If you want to circle back around to the point, I'm glad to keep discussing it.
Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Epic Games makes and publishes games for phones. Fire tablet apps and its app store are just Android apps, it's just that Amazon doesn't sell phones so they don't brand it like that. And Amazon also takes a 30% cut… > Profit margins on B2B are generally way higher than B2C, the way B2C companies typically achieve high profitability is via ads on valuable content which is a tough ask for smaller companies. Where are…
First of all, it's not 10%, it's closer to 30% [1]. Estimates put 2022 App Store profits at ~$60B [2], 30% of $60B is $18B. Are you arguing that losing a portion of $18B doesn't matter? $2B of those profits alone is more than any company I've worked for makes in revenue. It's also a lot of money for any company to be losing. If you're the type of business leader who's cavalier about a billion here or there, more powe…
90% of all App Store sales comes from in app purchases from play to win games - that came out in the Epic trial.
That means at most 10% come from non games or B2C
Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everything, really. Nothing at all, really > To my knowledge, Chromium doesn't feature anything that couldn't be reverse-engineered or conditionally re-implimented by third-parties. To your knowledge. It's just Chrome-only Chrome-specific code inside a 50-million-line codebase that may or may not depend on very Chrome-specific things. > Maybe some things are nonstandard, but if there's user demand for it then why c…
This thread isn't about the one-sidedness of Apple's criticism. It's about criticizing Apple, and you're deciding to derail it with an unrelated strawman arguement. If you want to circle back around to the point, I'm glad to keep discussing it.
This is the comment I was replying to in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39408640 Where the person quite literally said "I don't care if it only works in Chrome, since its market share is high enough".