Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems

exactscan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 454 posts

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

#261

Post by [deleted] »

taurath wrote: post #26
epse wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying for updates has been the standard software model for ages, and with good reason. It still takes money to update and add new features. It still takes time. To some extent new users can pay for this, but then developers have to severely limit the time spent on updates in order to nod spend too much, or they risk not even making a profit on the first version. That is why most "big" software packages these days ar…

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

[deleted]

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

#263

Post by kkarakk »

awinder wrote: post #238
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

30% is high but it’s not just payment processing, it’s payment fraud insulation, download bandwidth, and marketplace amplification (people finding your app without knowing they’re looking for your app). Apple also drops subscription costs from the second year on to 15% which is coming back to reality. I personally find the subscription model way more sustainable & less user hostile than the paid versioning upgrade mo…

>marketplace amplification

this never happens, if you JUST upload your app to the store and think it will take off coz it has good features then good luck. In reality you have to upload and then pay some app advertisement agency to feed your app to the multiple tech blogs to inorganically promote it. App store is full of inorganically promoted trash nowadays

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

#264

Post by Konnstann »

kevingadd wrote: post #120
cameronbrown wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because nobody uses the Microsoft Store.

You can claim the MS Store is an outlier because "nobody uses it" (maybe? got numbers? it's obviously not #1, though) but other stores offer lower cuts as well. Epic made a big deal out of their lower cut (~12%) compared to the other stores and developers seem to be paying attention.

The Epic store doesn't need to make money, they have Fortnite for that. A barebones store missing features that even the worst online marketplaces have, is just their attempt to become the new "monopoly" if they can get enough of steam's customer base. Once the platform matures and they stop throwing money at devs and giving away free games, we'll see what changes they make, if any.

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

#265

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

dijit wrote: post #256
baud147258 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps your games on Steam would be better received if they didn't force the buyer to also install a crapware like Uplay on top of Steam and forcing to create another user account to play a game the buyer has just paid for (perhaps it has changed, I haven't bought an Ubi game in years).

Regarding a second account; I'm afraid there's very little that can be done on that front, there was account linking added some time ago that meant you didn't need to maintain or continually log-in to uplay, you just create a linked account and forget about it- no second password needed I believe. So at least for usability it should not be any different than normal. If you have other specific complaints about uPlay t…

Well, I can assure you that seeing a game requires uPlay means I'm probably not going to buy it, and I'm not alone in that. Of course, I haven't even wanted to play an Ubisoft game since... I honestly can't remember, so I guess I'm not the target audience anyway.

> Unless the problem is that you have to have a second launcher?

That's a big part of it. I have enough crapware that insists on constantly running on my PC (a lot of it direct from MS these days, sigh).

PS: Oh yeah, and it wants me to sign up for an account too. Hooray! I don't have enough of accounts spread all over the goddamned place already.

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

#267

Post by kkarakk »

gumby wrote: post #122

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% m…

It doesn't in India. Something is borked about their servers internationally, updates fail on me around 30 percent of the time

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

#268

Post by ajscanlan »

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.

> And Apple gives this all away for free.

$99 a year actually, plus 30% of all sales.

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

#269

Post by ajscanlan »

Razengan wrote: post #229
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

> And Apple taking 30% of that... for what? Payment processing uhhh.. hosting and bandwidth for potentially millions of downloads and updates and your videos and screenshots? Covering user refunds? A reviews and feedback system? Crash logs? Showing you in user searches? The Editor's Choice and Featured Apps lottery? Invitations to develop for yet-to-be announced platforms? Giving your users peace of mind that your ap…

None of which you can opt out of.

I'd happily host my own apps and pay the hosting/bandwidth than pay the $99 a year for Apple Developer Account + 30% of all sales.

But Apple won't let me, if I want my app to run on iOS I have no choice BUT to use their bandwidth.

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

#270

Post by vezycash »

prepend wrote: post #228
vezycash wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hardware from that era would be slow. If you used an iphone 3 right now it'll be slow guaranteed. Also the first iphones were shiny toys, underpowered and featureless compared to Nseries and Win mobile. If they were that good, Microsoft would have responded immediately.

That is not true at all. The iPhone had “amazing” features for the time- a real browser, visual voicemail, photo management, music integration, three way calling, contact integration. Almost all were incremental but really made the functions more useful.

And no apps apart from the built-ins. No copy and paste. Just like a feature phone. Apart from the browser and music courtesy ipod, other smart phones had the remaining features and far more robust. They may not have had fancy UI, but they were more powerful at the time.

Even the camera megapixel craze was being led by nokia. You're conflating the current dominance of the iphone for the past. At the time, the best thing about it was the finger only touch screen operation. To the best of my memory, others still needed to fall back to a stylus. Finger usage was a whackamole operation with Nseries and blackerry I used then

Post reply on HN