171–180 of 671 posts
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> Fortnite was also banned by Google. I think the main reason this wasn't as newsworthy is that sideloading it was trivial for Android users. Untick a warning and install it yourself.
Trivial for you, a reader on HN. Not trivial, and potentially unsafe, for my grandmother.
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How do people come up with these arbitrary rates? How is 30% anticompetitive and 15% okay? 30% was standard long before the App Store, so why does Apple have to lower it now that they're the most profitable app platform?
It's just consensus. 30% seems very large, 15% is tolerable. I don't think anyone liked 30% before either but anyone that can get away with charging 30% is probably already in a monopoly position so nobody has ever been able to do anything about it. Apple are only change now because of the threat of a lawsuit.
They hope to significantly reduce the pressure on politicians to take a close look at their App store practices by significantly reducing the absolute number of developers suffering the full impact whilst taking the minimum possible hit to their revenue. This has nothing to do with “doing the right thing” or “accelerating innovation” and everything to do with limiting the number of outraged letters to senators from devs, the number of newspaper interviews with prominent indie developers & so on.
Indie devs have an outsize PR impact relative to their revenue contribution, so buy them off with a smaller revenue tax that delivers outsize returns if it prevents the 30% house rake on the majority of Apple’s App Store income coming under scrutiny.
Apple / Google’s 30% take is the anti-competitive elephant in the room here, not a few crumbs thrown to small developers.
Wouldn’t it be funny if the federal government released marketing like this exactly talking about progressive taxes aimed at Apple as it got larger and larger. “If you are only a $1M company, we will tax 15%, when you pass the $1B threshold, your tax will increase to 30%, and when you pass the $1T threshold, your tax will increase to 60%” Isn’t the goal of progressive taxes to introduce a kind of ‘you won at life, th…
I make no moral judgment that we should tax someone more highly in order to make things progressively more difficult for them.
The way this is worded makes no sense - surely it should be for the first $1,000,000? $1,000,000 = $150,000 $1,000,001 = >$300,000? It feels like a knee-jerk reaction to the ongoing complaints without much forethought other than an arbitrary change in the percentage below some round number.
So on Jan 1st every year your commission would suddenly fall from 30% to 15%, until you hit $1M and it jumps back up to 30%? That seems rather arbitrary.
TLDR; New program reduces App Store commission to 15 percent for small businesses earning up to $1 million per year
Wow. That's amazing. That's a 20% increase in revenue for those eligible. I'm guessing they decided the increased value of their products from more smaller developers creating apps for the platform is greater than the lost revenue. If I understand correctly though, since it's a hard cutoff it creates this gap between 1m and ~1.2m where you're actually worse off by making more money pre-tax. 999k --[-15%]--> 849k 1000…
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What makes you think it is a joke? Happy to hear why you think 15% is reasonable.
Because by suggesting Apple pay developers to make apps and not the other way around you either don't know history, how markets and distribution work, or you're making a joke. You strategy played out very well in pre 2008 days with Windows Mobile. It also played out very well for Microsoft paying developers to create apps for Windows Phone, before Microsoft admitted defeat and left the phone market they were in since…
> about the 15%
Yeah, about that. As it is, it’s monopoly rent (and before you bring up consoles - yes, there too). Nothing more, nothing less. Personally, I wouldn’t be happy with 5% or 1% either, because the point is not how you measure the tax, but the tax itself and the fact that it’s not set by the market. Once they allow third-party appstores they can charge 50% for all I care.
I’m seeing a lot of positive comments on HN about this: to me it seems to be purely a cynical piece of PR on Apple’s part. They hope to significantly reduce the pressure on politicians to take a close look at their App store practices by significantly reducing the absolute number of developers suffering the full impact whilst taking the minimum possible hit to their revenue. This has nothing to do with “doing the rig…