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Apple, Epic, and the App Store

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Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#131

Post by romanoderoma »

badsectoracula wrote: post #114
romanoderoma wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just the tip of the iceberg https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/mar/11/my-kids-spent-...

Uh, that is about iPad, so Apple's walled garden didn't help. And kids shouldn't be able to buy things with their parents' cards, which is something completely unrelated to a platform being open or not.

The problem is that once you go down the streets dressed as a Batman to do justice, you'll find a villian dressed as a penguin

Apple store is not more secure because it's a walled garden, people will always find other ways to scam other people

Apple could just make sideload possible declining responsibility

It doesn't sound very hard to me, for a company like Apple which employ some of the best talents in the World

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#132

Post by braythwayt »

badsectoracula wrote: post #108
noncoml wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who don’t want to exposed their non-technical family to the Wild West of Android.

This is common FUD for Android, but i have non-technical family members and all of them use Android devices (because they were cheaper). I never had any of them complain about issues with their phones and Android doesn't exactly let you download stuff out of the box, you have to explicitly enable it and it pops up a scary warning whenever you do so. Yes, people can ignore that warning, but considering it is there and…

Speaking of FUD, come now. Me choosing to buy an Apple or recommend Apple to my family doesn't "make the entire society worse."

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#133

Post by halter73 »

zaksoup wrote: post #62
orliesaurus wrote: post #14

Okay this is going to sound stupid but maybe someone else feels like me about it: I don't understand why Apple has to take such a big chunk from transactions of in-app purchases? Similarly Google. Why 30%? Why not 5%? That feels like it would be more honest. Is it just because "they can"?

This is something I hadn't thought about until the article pointed it out. According to the first link in google ( https://www.braze.com/blog/in-app-purchase-stats/ ) the average iOS IAP in 2017 was $1.08. If you compare that to Square and Stripe's fee structure then the processing fees charged by the credit card processors is about 25%. This means Apple's taking for themselves much closer to a 5% cut which seems muc…

Why compare to Square's or Stripe's fee structure? It's ridiculous to claim "This means Apple's taking for themselves much closer to a 5% cut" as if Apple is paying a $0.29 processing fee per IAP.

If developers had a choice in payment processors, they could choose one with smaller minimum per-transaction fees, aggregate multiple payments from the same customer, try out subscriptions instead of microtransactions so the payment processor takes a smaller cut, etc...

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#134

Post by zaphoyd »

izacus wrote: post #93
spanhandler wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raises hand . I don't wanna have to worry about stupid computer shit when I'm just trying to use my iPad or iPhone as a tool to accomplish something else. Drawing, playing music, reading, writing, edutainment for the kids, very occasionally a game. Maybe the odd SSH session. If I decide I want some software to help me with any of those things I just want it to be in the App Store, and I just want it to use the App St…

Nothing what you say has absolutely ANYTHING to do with you being locked out from ever running your own software on Apple devices. This is a completely false argument you're putting up - you can HAVE all of those protections while STILL having the option of replacing protected software with less safe one. Please stop peddling this false argument.

On the Mac, where the App store is not required, a great deal of software is not in the App store and as a result the user does not benefit from App Store policies for said software. By forbidding sideloading, it forces developers to meet the App Store standards or not play at all. There are developers whose software is present on the iOS app store but the companion Mac app is not.

I don't like the complete lockout either. I like being able to run my apps on my device. But it is most definitely true that the ability to sideload apps results, in practice, in some developers opting out of providing App Store protected apps in favor of asking you to sideload.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#135

Post by stale2002 »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #94
bluedevil2k wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

actual harm => consumers end up paying more for the apps because the app developers have to increase their price to cover Apple's cut (which is more like a shakedown). I don't see any reason why a company needs to pay any percent of their revenue instead of a flat fee. You pay a % of revenue when someone is your partner or an investor in your company. Apple is neither. In fact, they've shown to be the opposite of a t…

> actual harm => consumers end up paying more for the apps because the app developers have to increase their price to cover Apple's cut (which is more like a shakedown). So what? All markets work like this. Food prices go up whenever there fuel prices increase, so the grocery store increases the cost to cover the higher cut taken by the supply chain. Apple created this entire market - they could've been far more anti…

> So what? All markets work like this. Food prices go up whenever there fuel prices increase

If it were a monopoly then anti-competitive practices, that would result in price increases, would be illegal .

> Apple created this entire market

It doesn't matter if they created the whole market. That is completely irrelevant to the legality of anti-competitive practices. Now, they are a monopoly, and they are no longer to allowed to engage in anti-competitive behavior.

> they could've been far more anti-competitive than they are

The idea that they could do worse, is not an argument against something as for why it is not bad.

Apple could do many things that are worse than what they are doing now. Maybe, in the future they will hire assassins to kill anyone who does not own an iphone. But that hypothetical world, does not make the current world any better. It is not an excuse.

> Why should the free advertising, access to a market that has users that spend more on average, be free to anyone?

Because the purpose of laws are to help consumers, not to protect apple. The reason why the law should force apple to allow competitors, is because by doing this, this helps consumers.

> They had market dominance - Apple does not.

Apple absolutely has market dominance over apps that are sold on the iphone. They prevent competitors from running app stores on that platform.

This is a huge market.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#136

Post by badsectoracula »

gtsteve wrote: post #124
badsectoracula wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, it's legal today but should we make it illegal? IMO, yes. We make it illegal for someone to come into your home and take your stuff, which ends up with you losing control over it (you have no more access to your stuff), so it also makes sense to make it illegal for someone to decide to not allow you install or modify the stuff you have (again taking control away from you). The way most of these platforms run i…

> We make it illegal for someone to come into your home and take your stuff It's not illegal however if you signed a contract to that effect, which is what you did when you started using the platform. A better analogy is that you're renting some furniture and the furniture is found to be unsafe. The company can come and take it away, either replacing it with something else or refunding you. In the software world nobo…

The question above was about if something should be made illegal, not what the current state of affairs is.

Also i'm not arguing about who owns the software, i never asked for ownership of the software, i ask for being able to be in control of the software that runs in the hardware i do actually own. This does not require me owning the OS that runs in my hardware.

And yes, i'm sure someone would do the oven stuff if it was possible and making that illegal would also be something that would be needed.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#138

Post by Ma8ee »

badsectoracula wrote: post #82
jasode wrote: post #6

In the spirit of this particular story, I'd like to ask HN the following question: Should closed hardware (that owns its entire stack) even be legal to sell? Yes, it's legal today but should we make it illegal? To try another example besides Apple iPhone, consider the $35000 Prima Cinema movie server to play 1st run movies at home on day of release: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22prima+cinema%22&source=ln... In m…

> Yes, it's legal today but should we make it illegal? IMO, yes. We make it illegal for someone to come into your home and take your stuff, which ends up with you losing control over it (you have no more access to your stuff), so it also makes sense to make it illegal for someone to decide to not allow you install or modify the stuff you have (again taking control away from you). The way most of these platforms run i…

If it was clearly stated before I bought the oven that it was limited to a certain number of recipes that the manufacturer provided, I actually don’t see the problem. You knew from the start what you were paying for.

And for your complaint that all the other ovens are crap and explode. Shouldn’t you take that up with the people making those ovens, not the one that made the locked oven? Maybe it’s very very hard to make ovens that don’t explode from time to time when people can cook whatever they want in them?

If someone came after you paid them and said, btw, you can’t make muffins in this oven, then I think it’s fair to be upset. But in the current situation, no.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#139

Post by liability »

jasode wrote: post #6

In the spirit of this particular story, I'd like to ask HN the following question: Should closed hardware (that owns its entire stack) even be legal to sell? Yes, it's legal today but should we make it illegal? To try another example besides Apple iPhone, consider the $35000 Prima Cinema movie server to play 1st run movies at home on day of release: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22prima+cinema%22&source=ln... In m…

> "You can't argue that Prima Cinema should not be locked down (claiming anti-competitive behavior)"

Yes I can.

> because the paranoid film studios wouldn't even license their content if it wasn't

That's fine by me.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#140

Post by bluedevil2k »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #94
bluedevil2k wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

actual harm => consumers end up paying more for the apps because the app developers have to increase their price to cover Apple's cut (which is more like a shakedown). I don't see any reason why a company needs to pay any percent of their revenue instead of a flat fee. You pay a % of revenue when someone is your partner or an investor in your company. Apple is neither. In fact, they've shown to be the opposite of a t…

> actual harm => consumers end up paying more for the apps because the app developers have to increase their price to cover Apple's cut (which is more like a shakedown). So what? All markets work like this. Food prices go up whenever there fuel prices increase, so the grocery store increases the cost to cover the higher cut taken by the supply chain. Apple created this entire market - they could've been far more anti…

> Apple created this entire market

Which market? 3rd party software on a computing device? Sorry, that was dozens of years prior. Packaged apps on a mobile device? Sorry, I had those on my Treo in 2001. They haven’t really created any market, they just created a software monopoly on their hardware using existing ideas.

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