Does this feel like a scramble to make up for lack of innovation lately? Apple is taking away from the community that builds them up which seems like a play to make quick profits. It would be too much to hope for an open platform that was curated by some decentralized voting mechanism via community / contributors.
How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
101–110 of 215 posts
Re: How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However, when a user is clearly searching for alternatives on the app store, it matters how far down you have to scroll to find a 3rd party app. If I delete Apple's Calendar, install a third party Calendar app (like Fantastical), and click a date link, I'll get a message asking me if I want to reinstall Apple's Calendar. I think it's pretty darn clear in that scenario what the user actually wants.
On the other hand, Apple products are (or were) frequently marketed towards the tech illiterate ("it just works") and so it's possible grandma accidentally deleted the calendar, tried to re-download via the App Store, downloaded the wrong one, etc.
Even if they also installed a third party Calendar app?
That strikes me as a frivolous concern, but if it worries Apple, there's an easy solution—add a "defaults" menu in Settings, like every other OS. Set it up so the default can only be changed by the user, and remains associated with the first party app even on uninstall.
We're coming up on the 13th version of iOS, and Apple hasn't done this yet. I don't think it's because they haven't gotten around to it.
Actually, I suspect that advantaging their own apps is a key part of Apple's business strategy for the future. Consider their recent shift towards "services". If the iPhone didn't exist, it would be silly to expect Apple to outdo major incumbents like Spotify, Netflix, and Venmo, but Apple thinks it can leverage its status as iPhone platform holder against competitors.
Re: How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
#103Is it not ironic that the NYT, of all companies, cites a different company for prioritizing its own agenda at the expense of being unbiased?
Not that it's right for either case, just ironic.
Re: How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
#104Whole Foods stacks their stores with their 365 brand products. In some cases, competitors to certain products aren't even sold. Of course, there are other grocery stores you can shop at. Just like how there are other mobile platforms you can use. (well: there's another mobile platform, singular. that's a problem). I don't understand the argument for the App Store being a monopoly. Apple can do whatever they want in t…
It's hard to explain from a mobile, but in a nutshell generally retail stores buy the goods they are selling, whether store brand or third party, so they can differentiate the products in store how they like. Suppliers can and do use leverage like withholding popular brands from stores that go too far in favoring the house brand. Apps however have no such leverage, and due to the way the store is set up, the retail d…
I'm not convinced that its so different, at least from a "we should be concerned about it" angle.
Yes, retail stores have inventory that they, generally, have to purchase and hold before the sale. This is a natural limitation on the amount and variety of goods they can offer.
By comparison, app stores don't have inventory. But they do have natural limitations. There's a cost to each sale, represented by the 15-30% fees the App Store charges, which is a translation of underlying fees that Apple pays to host and distribute applications, whether paid to credit card networks, engineers, cloud infrastructure providers, supporting services such as iCloud, etc. There is a per-unit cost to app store downloads; its just that most of it is paid on the purchase, download, and use of the application, not hosting.
Additionally, App Store search result rankings are absolutely a limited resource which very closely resembles aisle space in a retail store.
When thinking about this specific issue (which dates back over 16 months ago? and has been fixed? why are we talking about this?): I don't see a philosophical or legal problem with Apple doing this. I see a usability problem. Its just bad results that aren't delivering what customers expect or want.
Re: How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
iOS revenue is 2x larger than android. There might be more cheap android phones out there but Apple has the majority of high income individuals.
Which is not relevant. Monopoly is defined on a market, not on income segments (and even if it mattered, still on the high income individuals iOS is hardly above say 70%). Someone could sell cars for $5K and have 99% of the car market in a small city of 1000 people, while another one sells a single car for 100M and has 20 times the other's revenue. It's still the cheap car guy that has the monopoly.
Revenue based market share is more relevant than unit market share for most businesses. Apple pulls in 2/3 of the revenue in the mobile app ecosystem and gets to act as a gatekeeper between most consumer startups and their potential customers.
Re: How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
#106Have you noticed the NYT bashing Silicon Valley more lately? Someone did an article on how it’s a strategy to save their ad money. Really.
Tech companies are some of the largest and most influential companies in the world, and people are just now starting to understand what it means to have their lives influenced by wide-reaching algorithms. Sounds like a great topic for journalism to me.
Regardless of the motivation, NYT's recent algorithm-centric investigations (like the YouTube one a month or two back) are really interested and well-researched.
Re: How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you read the article? If you search for Podcast not only is Apple’s podcast app is first, but so it is follows by their compass app, find my friends, their tips app, their tv app, their watch app, their files app, their iTunes app, Apple Books, their reminders app, their news app, their contacts app, then their voice memos app before any 3rd party podcasts app appears. Meta comment regarding HN community... looki…
Regarding the HN community, the guidelines are pretty specific on the topic of your comment: > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In this case his comment is appropriate, because the comments here on HN clearly indicate that the commenters had not read the article.
Re: How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not what I got from the article though. Maybe I misread it, but I see that it's talking about how if you say "Podcast" in the search box, you'll see pages and pages of Apple's own apps, unrelated to podcasts, before you start seeing podcast apps.
> "in May 2018" If you search for podcast now you see an ad, then apple podcasts, then a story about creating podcasts, then apps. In my case I have Spotify on 3rd place after 2 popular local radio apps. The article conveniently omits a history chart for 'podcast' search to push their agenda.
Thanks. I was going with what the NY Times told me! :-)
Re: How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
You lost me with your analogy. Let me extend the pigskin thought exprement a bit. If I own the football team, and the field, and the city (hell, why not), then sure I can choose who plays QB, so I choose my son. Maybe at the start he's even not that bad of a QB, and our team wins some games. Everyone is happy. After a little while though, people realize there's no sense trying out for QB on my team. My son, now left…
It's more like: Apple built, run, maintains and owns a stadium. The stadium has a food court with many food stalls. Some of them, Apple runs themselves, but tons of others are run by people who pay N% of their revenues to Apple to be able to have them. They still need to supply their own food, branding, marketing, furniture, and pay their staff, Apple gives them access to the stadium crowds and a payment processing s…
Yes, and that's part of why you pay $10 for a domestic beer, and $5 for a hot dog.
So the argument is going to boil down to this... Is the curation Apple does to the App Store worth market effects of effectively turning it into a stadium for software? Given that I can't easily give my friend the tool I built to run on their phone, and the App Store is filled with "bad" apps (by basically every definition), I'm going to argue it's not worth it.
Re: How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
#110I wouldn't say I have trouble considering this issue, I know what my opinion is. The ramifications feel uncomfortable because Apple is the Goliath, it feels bizarre their behavior should need defending.
The idea I get hung up on is Apple doesn't control the market, they control access to the customers companies want. And those customers made a free choice to enter apple's ecosystem. They could get an Android, they could get none of the above. The game consoles have had an incredibly locked down marketplace. nintendo had to basically build their brand on it in the wake of atari in the 80s. Why do mobile marketplaces get such additional scrutiny? The orders of magnitude more money? The pervasiveness of mobile devices? The utility of the devices?
The area where I do struggle is the apple tax, they don't pay it while everyone else has to. My reflexive feeling, is that if you can't provide 20% value over what apple can provide, there might be intrinsic issues; your product might be a commodity. But for something like spotify, where the service exists way beyond the iOS platform, it seems wild that apple get 20% of anything that goes through its platform.