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We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems

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Re: We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems

#121

Post by kevingadd »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #41
taurath wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Apple taking 30% of that... for what? Payment processing is a 4% thing. It’s in the app developers interest to make it not have errors. It’s just for access to the market. That is the only value Apple truly brings, outside of the brand and a privacy commitment

Considering no one else seems to be able to sell access to a similar market, it seems to be a valuable thing to sell.

How would you sell access to the iOS market? If you're just saying 'they have full control so they can set the price', well yeah, but that doesn't automatically make it reasonable to give up most of your control and hand out 30% of your revenue in order to pick up additional customers. It seems like today in 2019 more people are deciding the customers aren't as profitable as they look.

Re: We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems

#122

Post by gumby »

I like the App Store because it handles automatic updates pretty well. Then again these days with sparkle, the apps I use do update, so it's not a big advantage for Apple.

And how do I know sparkle works so well? Well whenever a dev has an app both in the store and directly downloadable from their site I choose the latter. The price is the same, the functionality is the same (or sometimes more) but the dev gets 30% more. I've never heard one suggest that I download instead of using the store so I assume Apple somehow contractually bars that.

I never use the store for discovery; duckduckgo works perfectly well.

All in all I thought the App Store would be a good idea for me as a user but in the end it didn't add much. At least I think it got rid of some of those crufty download sites.

Re: We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems

#123

Post by kevingadd »

dijit wrote: post #50
taurath wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Apple taking 30% of that... for what? Payment processing is a 4% thing. It’s in the app developers interest to make it not have errors. It’s just for access to the market. That is the only value Apple truly brings, outside of the brand and a privacy commitment

People get hung up on apple having a 30% entrance fee, but that didn't come out of nowhere. I work in the video games industry and access to steam or other first parties (Sony/Microsoft) is 30%, no negotiations. You could argue that first parties such as sony/microsoft have subtle costs involved such as printing of disks, but that's paid for before market by the publisher. The thing you pay for is: content distributi…

Your claim that steam/sony/microsoft all charge 30% no negotiations is dated if not completely inaccurate. It might have been that way the last time you were involved in negotiations (if ever) but it's questionable whether that's still true - we know for a fact Valve offers a lower cut to big studios now. There's basically no guarantee that it's not possible to negotiate anymore, and I would be shocked if the Playstation or XBox business wings were unwilling to negotiate a cut down in order to land a big, million-selling title.

Is your claim that the iOS store cut is 30% because Steam was 30%? Kind of an odd argument given that the iOS store was heavily focused on "apps" initially, and still sort of is, even if games ended up being a big moneymaker.

The 30% is now coming out of a different sort of product than it did at store launch, too. Lots and lots of F2P stuff with in-app purchases, subscriptions, etc. Even if 30% was justified for single-purchase apps, does it make sense to continue giving them an ongoing 30% of all revenue when IAPs and subscriptions are literally not using any Apple infrastructure if they're things like 'unlocking premium features in the app you already have' or 'getting premium support'?

Re: We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems

#124

Post by kevingadd »

lilyball wrote: post #72
jdnenej wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of value steam provides on top of payment processing and distribution is immense. Valve basically single handedly created Linux gaming. Their client is so many years ahead of everything else with the forums, workshop, broadcast streaming, streaming to your tv, gamepad support and gamepad virtualisation as well as a mountain of developer side APIs for things like inviting friends to games. Apples 30% would…

Apple meanwhile created the entire OS and all of the developer APIs that your apps rely on, including things like Metal that games rely on. And Apple gives this all away for free.

It's free, is it? How do I install it in a vmware image for automated testing, or on this PC with compatible hardware I built?

What you're looking for is something like "free for owners of Apple hardware", which is true, but very different. You paid for it.

Re: We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems

#125

Post by pjmlp »

jonplackett wrote: post #115
pjmlp wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, maybe for US citzens. We were already using Symbian, Psion and PocketPC based phones. The first phone with hardware support for OpenGL ES was the Nokia N95 released in September 2006, one year before iPhone, with Asphalt as their show game.

Yeah, but those phones were not very good

From whose point of view?

Re: We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems

#126

Post by kevingadd »

askafriend wrote: post #21

I'm sorry but as a user, I trust my relationship with Apple more than I trust random third party devs. As a user, I want Apple to lock down the system and make things hard for developers. As a developer, I empathize with my perspective as a user and build products that take this into account.

I'm guessing this isn't what you meant, but the endgame of "Apple, please make things hard for developers" is there's no apps left for you to use that aren't made by Apple, because they made it too hard for developers.

A balance has to be struck somewhere. Developers increasingly do not like where Apple is placing the balance (generally on the side of 'go screw yourself, time to rework your app for our latest guideline and API changes, also buy some new hardware to run the latest xcode')

Re: We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems

#127

Post by api »

echelon wrote: post #65

The fact that we have to have humans look at our software before we can go to market in 2019 is absurd. I had high hopes for the future as a teen growing up with Napster, Bittorrent, IRC, Trillian/Pidgin, and an explosive WWW. Look at what a pinheaded mess everything has become. Greed destroyed the open and experimental Internet.

Spam and malware destroyed the open experimental Internet.

Re: We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems

#128

Post by kevingadd »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #100
parasubvert wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not allowed to create a crippled or discounted version per the App Store rules. You are allowed to make the same version available elsewhere and pocket the margins. This is what BBEdit has been doing for many years for example.

Even if the products had different names? Or are you saying once you put one product in app store they all have to go in.

You're not dealing with an excel spreadsheet here. Apple has rules that are enforced by humans. If you try to cheat them out of the 30% they believe you owe them, they will punish you for it by removing you from the store. So far, very few (if any) companies have gotten away with it. You can't just point to a tiny asterisk or typo in the terms and get them to go 'oh well I guess you got us then'. They have the power.

This is why you can't purchase kindle books from the iOS app and have to use a web browser to do it. Even that is kind of an exception (people already have existing Kindle libraries, so it's not really reasonable for Apple to tell them to go screw themselves - but you bet they're gonna demand 30% of on-device purchases!)

One pattern I've seen however in modern mobile games is that instead they use an loyalty program, where if you buy direct from them (at the same price) they give you free bonuses that you don't get on the iOS store. That satisfies the "equivalent price" and "no crippling" semi-rules but I suspect eventually Apple will decide to punish it too.

Re: We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems

#129

Post by realusername »

close04 wrote: post #109
ramraj07 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the human review is the reason for the 30% cut why not charge a flat fee per review? I doubt that's the reason for their cut.

The reason Apple charges the 30% is probably partly because of the whole infrastructure and services needed for the app-store, and mostly Apple's desire to profit. The reason developers pay the 30% is probably because there's no other channel that offers access to such a huge market for free, and mostly because they still profit. Every app could be cheaper from the buyer's perspective. Maybe even yours. Should or wil…

> The reason developers pay the 30% is probably because there's no other channel that offers access to such a huge market for free, and mostly because they still profit.

Because there's no choice you mean? When the developers have choice, on the Mac or on Windows, they generally avoid the store. The AppStore still works on mobile because they force it.

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