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Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups

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Re: Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups

#191

Post by pen2l »

pjc50 wrote: post #188
pen2l wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather another one not exist, because then it would become a game of incentives... app owners might only make their apps available on THAT App Store, resulting in App Store's value being diminished. I would like that the one App Store be the one and the only one in a KISS principle. Apple so far hasn't failed me, and so I continue to trust it and its judicious management and curation of apps. Folks who care about…

Ah, the Highlander principle: there can be only one. The complete opposite of a "market", of course, which is why the rest of us are gearing up the non-market mechanisms against it. This applies in reverse, of course. The existence of the Apple store makes certain apps only available for the Apple store (iOS only), so therefore us Android users need to have it banned so we can continue to have choice.

I think a switch happened inside me roughly 5 years ago, that I went from eschewing walled gardens to now valuing them more and more. Too much of my life has been wasted fighting through dark patterns, finding cancel screens, or being had by manipulative subscription arrangements wherein there are cancelation fees or complex terms of service that somehow make cancelation difficult.

When I paid 1k-something dollars for an iPhone 16 a few months ago, I did not pay for a general purpose computing device, no, I paid for a device that can take pictures, and has certain apps that I like which I know how much I'm paying for, and I know that with ease I will be able to active/deactivate its subscription with zero struggle. That's what I paid for, a device made by a company whose discretion I trust and support, and I pray it continues being this way.

Re: Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups

#192

Post by concinds »

jterrys wrote: post #150
jmull wrote: post #45

I think Apple should mostly be allowed to run as crappy an App Store as they want. But people should also be able to get apps from whatever store they want. (Ground rules all app stored would have to follow based on technical, security, and legal concerns would be fine too, IMO.) Of course Apple would never go for that, so we'll end up with whatever mess legal processes can wring out of them.

I agree with you in principle. But I also, I guess, kinda just have a dumb thought about this whole ordeal. Broadly speaking, we are in a position where we, the general public with the backing of the government, want to change how a private corporation uses it's products that it sold to us. Not for any other reason that would shield us from harm or prevent risk, but rather because the corporation's products are so su…

Okay. Now flip this free-enterprise metaphor.

Apple is dictating the behavior of every business operating in the digital market (Apple itself brags that this amounts to over $1 trillion, with a T, in economic activity), with the App Store, which has 70-80% profit margins, and numerous dev horror stories. Rejecting your update over something they previously approved, or something they let all your competitors do. Forcing their IAP system on you. Dictating what links you can put in your app, how you present prices (don't call out the Apple tax), what you can tell consumers in emails. Forcing their direct competitors to have an inferior user experiences (can't subscribe in Spotify, can't buy books in Kindle; oh, and bundling Apple Music/Books/TV with the OS, and advertising them throughout the OS). Threatening retaliation if you complain publicly ("If you run to the press, it never helps.") Blocking VPNs or secure messaging in authoritarian countries, and you can't sideload. Sabotaging the web to keep their monopoly (even trying to kill PWAs recently).

Apple feels entitled to a higher profit margin on your business than your business will ever achieve for itself! That's nuts!

Re: Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups

#193

Post by bloomca »

labcomputer wrote: post #146
bloomca wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Allow access" is pretty orthogonal, I don't know how it all works in mobile OSes, but I assume everything is virtualized there, so you can't just access whatever you want without user granting a permission (e.g. through a file picker system component). You can also ship sandboxed apps on Desktop without the store (although I am not sure on how hard it is to auto-update them, usually stores handle that part), at leas…

Well, some of the permissions include things like “allow the app to track the user for advertising purposes”. There isn’t a technical way to enforce that with virtualization and sandboxing. You can enforce it by booting misbehaving apps from the app store... but that only works if there’s one app store.

I _believe_ on macOS, if they revoke your certificate (the one you used to sign the app), the app moves into the "We can't verify that this app is free of malware" category, so in theory they can still do that.

But it is a nuclear option, and it would be a big deal if they did so for something "minor".

Re: Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups

#194

Post by matheusmoreira »

labcomputer wrote: post #153
tekkk wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a stupid argument. Maybe grandpas and grandmas should get a different phone then, like a Doro, and stop bringing the rest of us down. And it doesn't even hold water as my mother has been scammed by legitimate App Store apps that have charged extra-fees just because they could.

Or maybe the iPhone should be that phone and those who don’t like the closed ecosystem should get something else? Why would buy a phone that doesn’t work the way you like when alternatives exist?

Because we want the iPhone on our terms.

Re: Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups

#195

Post by tpdly »

pen2l wrote: post #191
pjc50 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the Highlander principle: there can be only one. The complete opposite of a "market", of course, which is why the rest of us are gearing up the non-market mechanisms against it. This applies in reverse, of course. The existence of the Apple store makes certain apps only available for the Apple store (iOS only), so therefore us Android users need to have it banned so we can continue to have choice.

I think a switch happened inside me roughly 5 years ago, that I went from eschewing walled gardens to now valuing them more and more. Too much of my life has been wasted fighting through dark patterns, finding cancel screens, or being had by manipulative subscription arrangements wherein there are cancelation fees or complex terms of service that somehow make cancelation difficult. When I paid 1k-something dollars fo…

And people like you will continue to have access to this curated experience. But developers who decide that access to you is not worth the platform fees will be able to pursue an alternative. Why wouldn't your bank remain on the App Store? Does the app store really lack that many dark patterns? (Billions spent gambling every year) Again: There is nothing to stop the walled gardens from being build, but they should be built within a competitive market!

Re: Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups

#196

Post by tpdly »

ensignavenger wrote: post #21
lloyddobbler wrote: post #4

“A 30% revenue share can easily be the difference between a company that can afford to scale, hire new employees, and reinvest in its product, and one that is perpetually struggling to stay afloat.” This brought up a fun thought exercise for me. Pretty sure that Y Combinator would argue that giving away 7% of one's company for access to intangible (but beneficial) things like funding, advisors, etc, is completely wor…

If there were competition for App Stores, we could discover what the correct market price for App Stores is, but Apple doesn't want that.

This is a very good argument. We would also learn what features of an App Store add marketable value, and what features are trivial. I imagine the front end isn't very important, but some kind of build certification/verification is. That requires branding, infrastructure and labor. Maybe its easier than I imagine to verify that apps aren't lying about what they do, but as far as I can tell that could well account for some 5% at cost.

On the other hand you trust your bank, for example, so you follow the link on their website and install the App, and the trust came from their own brand.

Re: Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups

#197

Post by ben_w »

ohdeargodno wrote: post #183
ben_w wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe grandpas and grandmas should get a different phone then, like a Doro They did, they got an iPhone. > my mother has been scammed by legitimate App Store apps that have charged extra-fees just because they could. Did it empty her bank balance by abusing the private NFC payment APIs that Apple are being ordered to open up? Did it cryptolock all her files? Did it activate the camera and mic to spy on her for blac…

>Did it empty her bank balance by abusing the private NFC payment APIs that Apple are being ordered to open up? NFC payment APIs have been open on Android for decades and no such thing of the sort has ever happened. You cannot magically conjure up a payment from Apple Pay to without user involvement and confirmation. >Did it cryptolock all her files? Apps do not have write access to all your files. >Did it activate t…

> NFC payment APIs have been open on Android for decades and no such thing of the sort has ever happened.

Google is also getting legal action for monopoly abuse of their app store, so what's possible today on Android is not sufficient to say what's safe or not.

Despite this, they're also already facing legal action for sharing too much data from Google Wallet.

Fail on all directions at the same time.

> Apps do not have write access to all your files.

> Every mobile device now has a giant notification saying that the device is using the microphone or recording video.

And this can't be circumvented ever, even when private APIs are no longer vetted? And none of the voices describing downloads warnings as "scare screens" aren't making the same demand on this?

> The disingenuous "having an open app store/not being locked in the walled garden is a security risk" is getting tiring, especially when it's basically all lies now. Unless your argument is that Apple is too incompetent to write APIs properly, in which case I wonder why you think that said APIs being private would prevent anything.

The disingenuous "force platforms to be open, there's no security risk" position was tiring decades ago when the iPhone was brand new, especially when it was obviously lies even then. Apple obviously isn't magically competent enough to write APIs properly, they had "goto fail" and all the jailbreaks we've seen in so many versions of iOS were specifically some random doc that users could install that included a way to escalate privileges, and even without that evidence we've also got access to the black market prices for zero-day exploits that for a long time showed they're cheaper than Android, and the obvious reason why this prevents "anything" is that "anything" is a massive subset of "everything".

Re: Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups

#198

Post by troupo »

nabla9 wrote: post #168
jmull wrote: post #45

I think Apple should mostly be allowed to run as crappy an App Store as they want. But people should also be able to get apps from whatever store they want. (Ground rules all app stored would have to follow based on technical, security, and legal concerns would be fine too, IMO.) Of course Apple would never go for that, so we'll end up with whatever mess legal processes can wring out of them.

> Of course Apple would never go for that They do in EU, because they were forced to. AltStore PAL https://altstore.io/ Buildstore https://builds.io/ Aptoide https://en.aptoide.com .. and so on

They also go out of the way to make these stores prohibitively expensive to set up and still applies app review to apps distributed through those stores (even though they claim they don't and won't)

Re: Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups

#199

Post by ndriscoll »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #179
matheusmoreira wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But people should also be able to get apps from whatever store they want. This the answer. The app store monopoly doesn't really matter, the real tyranny is needing Apple's cryptographic blessing to run software on our own computers. This should be literally illegal. Restore our computer freedom and their app store rent seeking becomes irrelevant.

It's a tradeoff. You may have the knowledge and risk awareness to install anything, circumvent protections like you still can on MacOS, but the vast majority does not and should not have that power; this led to huge botnets during the Windows XP era when many internet connections were first set up. They overcompensated with Vista, asking permissions for everything so people developed a kneejerk "just hit accept". The…

The problem with Windows XP was that at the time you plugged it into your modem directly (or the computer contained the modem if it was dialup) with no firewall, and it would get exploited in seconds without any user interaction through some default Microsoft background service. Wifi routers were probably a much larger impact than any operating system changes. Especially anything user facing. It's also why clickbait silliness aside, running windows XP isn't actually that likely to run into issues today.

Re: Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups

#200

Post by qcnguy »

JimDabell wrote: post #84
qcnguy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably, mobile operating systems would work more like macOS where apps can be installed directly from websites with a layer of (possibly server side) malware checking and more reliance on code signing/sandboxing. There's no inherent reason apps must be distributed via app stores.

> Probably, mobile operating systems would work more like macOS where apps can be installed directly from websites There’s no reason to speculate on this. We already saw Apple’s vision for an iPhone without an App Store. When the iPhone was first launched, Apple said that if you wanted to build an app for the iPhone, you should build a web app. People hated that, so Apple launched the App Store.

Don't conflate APIs with distribution.

Devs love web-style distribution. App Stores can be convenient for discovery, but that only matters for a limited number of apps.

What they didn't love was being forced into the JS/DOM straitjacket when Apple were building much higher quality APIs and implementations for native apps.

The combination of web-style distribution, an App Gallery for discovery, and still having the ability to use UIKit, would have been very popular.

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