111–120 of 258 posts
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Back in the NES era with licensing restrictions, yes. I believe it was Tengen vs Nintendo? Also Atari vs Activision? But the Switch, PS4, and XBox One ALL have closed app stores exactly the way Apple does. If Apple loses a lot of people will have to find a new business model.
You can buy digital codes to redeem games on those stores from third party retailers. Often at a discount.
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It’s a tricky claim to make for Apple. But it’s easy to make across the full ecosystem of digital app stores which are near universally 30 percent rakes. I’m including games in that list; Xbox, PlayStation, Steam, etc. That said, even if mobile apps are cheaper than they used to be many could be even cheaper if Apple took a 10% cut. I don’t like living in a world where almost every major distribution platform has com…
The game app stores have also driven prices way down from their 'traditional' retail prices. The argument for government remedy has to be based on some kind of actual harm to consumers rather than a feeling that 30% is too damn high.
Compare that to apple users. As a start, you'd probably have to convince those to buy a non-apple device. That's a huge barrier to entry. It might be justified, i you believe that's good for other reasons like security. But then we're far of from driving down app prices.
I want fine grained competition. It is what makes our economy more efficient. Market leaders in contrast don't want to compete on profitable parts of their business and as such, will employ any tactic possible to stop that. Like e.g. placing barriers to entry (see above). Or make it difficult do make informed decisions (stores reads quite a bit like printers and overpriced ink). Thus I have a hard time buying into those "this is for the good of the consumer" talking point.
Unfortunately for Apple, I do think the App Store being an exclusive and default way to purchase and load apps on iOS is in fact causing prices of Apps, in many cases, to be higher than they should be. The perfect example of this is the subscription services, right now you can get a cheaper subscription to a service such as Spotify if you buy it off the App Store. That is a prime example of how much the 30% payment t…
Apple provides a service for that 30% though. They handle the payment processing, they build, moderate and curate the App Store apps and they provide a lucrative channel to market for app developers. So allowing Spotify et al to get all the benefits of the channel without paying for it is actually unfair to Apple.
- Build, not exactly -- only in the sense that they can handle minor upgrades via bitcode for new ARM variants, if you choose to enable that.
- Moderate/curate, sure.
- Provide a lucrative channel? Yes, but only because they've made it the only channel by fiat.
I'm not sure I see 30% worth of mandatory value here. Is Apple's moderation so good it's worth 27% the cost of my app? Do developers think they're paying for bitcode upgrades, and do they think that justifies the fee? Recompiling for new minor architectures isn't difficult.
For that matter, is there more value provided in moderation for a more expensive app? If they approve my app at $5, and then I up the price to $25, did their moderation process retroactively become more valuable to anyone?
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It's true that iOS has a smaller share of the market globally, including many parts of Europe, but this overshadows the fact that iOS is almost on par with Android in the United States (44.3% to Android's 54.5% as of May 2018), probably higher among affluent users, and the leading mobile operating system in other countries such as Britain: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held... I feel this is…
10% lower than the next competitor, and less than half overall. Not a monopoly.
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You can buy digital codes to redeem games on those stores from third party retailers. Often at a discount.
Really? I think I’ve only ever seen that for Steam/GOG.
Unfortunately for Apple, I do think the App Store being an exclusive and default way to purchase and load apps on iOS is in fact causing prices of Apps, in many cases, to be higher than they should be. The perfect example of this is the subscription services, right now you can get a cheaper subscription to a service such as Spotify if you buy it off the App Store. That is a prime example of how much the 30% payment t…
How long have you been using the iOS app store for? IMO App prices now are lower than they were when the app store first opened in iPhoneOS 2, and way lower than they were before the iPhone. I remember simple games for Palm OS costing at about $20 [0] . Nowadays that game would either be [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20040418012411/http://astraware....
I completely agree that prices on Apps have come down but that is just what happens when a new market is created. Supply and demand has to set in. Developers are guessing what people will pay at first and if they find they can sell millions more if they just drop the price to 99c then they might just do that. In my opinion the Apple App Store has had very little to do with those prices coming down.
While I do admit the App Store was incredibly innovative and has ushered in an era of new ways for developers to create/distribute/monetize this stuff it is hard to deny that if there was any competing way to load Apps that the 30% fee Apple collects would stand... not to mention the many practices that developers (and consumers) disagree with that Apple regularly does such banning apps that may compete with their products or somehow upset them.
Edit: I don’t want to come off as overly negative here, I love Apple and their products. I am simply arguing that a little competition here would do consumers good.
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10% lower than the next competitor, and less than half overall. Not a monopoly.
But definitely an iOS monopoly.
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i wouldn’t pin that all on anti competitive behaviour though... the end to end control of the platform is kind of Apples MO, and is a fairly distinguishing feature between the Android ecosystem and the Apple ecosystem. it’d be nice to have another distribution option, but not at the expense of a simple UX, security, or any other very valid reason to only allow a tightly controlled experience
Oh okay, so as long as it's their MO to have a monopoly then it's fine. I'm sure plenty of iPhone users, for example, would like to have a PornHub app on their iPhone, but that's currently impossible because of Apple's guidelines. You could build a very high quality app and be denied for a reason strictly outside of the "UX, security 'or any other very valid reason'" that Apple arbitrarily decides.
Should Nintendo also be forced to sell a PornHub game?
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i wouldn’t pin that all on anti competitive behaviour though... the end to end control of the platform is kind of Apples MO, and is a fairly distinguishing feature between the Android ecosystem and the Apple ecosystem. it’d be nice to have another distribution option, but not at the expense of a simple UX, security, or any other very valid reason to only allow a tightly controlled experience
Oh okay, so as long as it's their MO to have a monopoly then it's fine. I'm sure plenty of iPhone users, for example, would like to have a PornHub app on their iPhone, but that's currently impossible because of Apple's guidelines. You could build a very high quality app and be denied for a reason strictly outside of the "UX, security 'or any other very valid reason'" that Apple arbitrarily decides.