91–100 of 198 posts
In my browser the ads cover the actual content. User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
I found the page quite clean (with cloudflareinsights.com, googlesyndication.com, and googletagmanager.com blocked of course).
>I’m saving approximately $84-120 CAD annually. I suppose most of this is eaten up by the need to pay apple $99 per year just to run your own app on your own phone for longer than a week.
This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app? When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price. I'm a longtim…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's fair to also cover the fairly rigorous testing that occurs for each app store submission. I'm not sure a hundred bucks is the right number, but it's not fair to say all they do is host the file.
You have to pay $99/year even if you only want to use the app on your own device. You can only sideload for free if you are willing to reinstall every X days. They don't need to test an app if you're not asking them to distribute it through their store.
Does this mean you lose data, or is data retained when reinstalling?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app? When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price. I'm a longtim…
This is why I switched to Android 10 years ago. Unfortunately the grass isn't looking much greener over there these days. I'd love to hear from individuals who worked at these companies whether it disgusts them as much as it does me, and ideas (from a business perspective as much as technical) on how a new platform might wrest control back into the hands of users/owners.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app? When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price. I'm a longtim…
> Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app? How much something costs is not what determines how much a company charges for something. A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money. A company only lowers prices if they think doing so will generate higher total profits in the long run. Apple seems to think charging $99 a year for…
It actually does - in a free market. That's, like, one of the main arguments why capitalism is good for the population and not evil. But in a gate-kept oligopoly like phones, actors can abuse the system to squeeze more money out of consumers, leaving the corporations as sole beneficiaries. That's why this kind of stuff usually gets curbed in functioning democracies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app? When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price. I'm a longtim…
> Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app? How much something costs is not what determines how much a company charges for something. A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money. A company only lowers prices if they think doing so will generate higher total profits in the long run. Apple seems to think charging $99 a year for…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app? When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price. I'm a longtim…
> Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app? How much something costs is not what determines how much a company charges for something. A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money. A company only lowers prices if they think doing so will generate higher total profits in the long run. Apple seems to think charging $99 a year for…
>I’m saving approximately $84-120 CAD annually. I suppose most of this is eaten up by the need to pay apple $99 per year just to run your own app on your own phone for longer than a week.
Nice hacker effort and writeup, but I want to comment on a general HN pattern of what tech people promote implicitly with hacker network effects... For every HN blog post of "I accomplished ___ despite a hacker-hostile platform, and now you can use what I built, and be hopelessly tied to the platform"... Baby Jesus Linus sheds a tear. In this case, it's a bit odd, since the writer has an entire section, "Why This Act…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app? When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price. I'm a longtim…
> Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app? How much something costs is not what determines how much a company charges for something. A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money. A company only lowers prices if they think doing so will generate higher total profits in the long run. Apple seems to think charging $99 a year for…
No company does this. Prices are set based upon demand. This does provide opportunities to make more money during some periods than others. If you have a monopoly then you can ignore this and just pick what makes you the most.
> Apple seems to think charging $99 a year for developers will help its long term bottom line the most.
It's absolutely a bespoke filter to prevent spam and automated misbehavior. Admittedly there does seem to be a resulting overall quality difference between iOS apps and other platforms.
> Prices aren't justified or not, you choose to pay them or not.
Business models are legal or not. You choose to play by the rules or you don't play.