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Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’

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Re: Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’

#321

Post by zasz »

baby wrote: post #247
michaelchisari wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Los Angeles has serious grade inflation across the board wrt social ratings. Their yelp reviews are completely unreliable, everything is 4 or 5 stars. I'm used to Chicago where even a great restaurant can have 3 stars because everyone is so picky, and the 4 or 5 stars are reserved for the truly extraordinary.

Good chinese restaurants in London (like my old place) end up having less than 4 stars because of service. I find that raging since the food is the only thing that should matter.

I love Chinese service. I hate feeling obligated to make small talk with the waiters. "Is everything fine?" Fuck off, I'm trying to talk to my friend here.

Re: Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’

#322

Post by freehunter »

scarface74 wrote: post #267
cptaj wrote: post #135

And they should. We are fast approaching a world where all markets are walled-in by a few international companies. I've had clients of mine go under because Amazon decided to close their accounts and they depend on the platform to sell their wares. Imagine how hard it is to sell stuff online if you're barred from ebay and amazon... and there is no legal recourse to appeal those bans. Same goes for app stores, what ha…

Most non game apps shouldn't be apps. They should be web pages. It would be faster development and you wouldn't be dependent on the app stores. A torrent remote app would never be allowed on the IOS app store, but going to https://remote.vuze.com and pairing your Vuze app can't be banned....

If it was easier to pin a web page to your home screen, I think this would catch on more. I run a website and I get requests a lot saying "you should have an app!" I ask what the app would do, and they say "what the website does, but stuck on my home screen."

It's also unfortunate that web pages have the disadvantage that they have the browser UI around them, so it reduces the space available to the page versus an app, and web pages don't have permissions that apps do like sending notifications. Some people view this as a good thing and I tend to agree, but it's still a big disconnect that my weather app can send me a notification saying there is a tornado in my area whereas a weather website needs me to actively be checking it.

Re: Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’

#323

Post by betenoire »

zasz wrote: post #321
baby wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good chinese restaurants in London (like my old place) end up having less than 4 stars because of service. I find that raging since the food is the only thing that should matter.

I love Chinese service. I hate feeling obligated to make small talk with the waiters. "Is everything fine?" Fuck off, I'm trying to talk to my friend here.

I hope you are exaggerating a little for fun. Asking if everything is fine isn't really small talk and definitely doesn't deserve contempt.

Re: Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’

#324

Post by minfduck »

tokyodude wrote: post #296
drb91 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rating the food, or rating the service? Rating them together is nonsensical.

both ways have problems. when I'm dissatisfied with a place I want to help people not go there but let's say there are separate ratings for service, decor, food, atmosphere. I don't want to lie so if the food tasted like garbage but everything else was a 5 then it will look like I'm helping to recommend the place with 5 5 1 5 average 4 out of 5. 4 out of 5 sounds like a recommendation but what I really wanted to say…

Those ratings shouldn't be averaged together though, because the weighting would be different for everyone. Each category would have its own average, and when I'm searching for a place, I would specify what I care about.

Re: Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’

#325

Post by zaroth »

jpetso wrote: post #134
DmenshunlAnlsis wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and WalMart has a “monopoly” on WalMarts, but that’s not actually a monopoly. If they had a monopoly on supermarket, that would be a legal issue. Apps is the space for competition, and Apple doesn’t have a monopoly on apps, or phones. In fact you can almost always get the same apps on multiple platforms. People just want something they can’t have, so they play word games to make themselves sound righteous rath…

Agreed. Instead of rectifying this via monopoly abuse laws, there should be regulations applicable to all hardware providers for allowing alternative software distribution mechanisms.

You want to make it illegal for someone to make a piece of hardware that can only run binaries signed by the manufacturer?

I can’t understand this at all. If I go through the trouble to create a product and I want to control the user experience for that product, that’s my right and privilege. The market will decide if they want to purchase my product or not.

Consumers have spoken, and spoken extremely loudly, that they like Apple’s approach. Why would you want to deny the right for this product to exist?

It’s an amazing product, and what Apple has accomplished with their App Store is nothing short of incredible. I love their approach and I think they are 100% entitled to charge what they want on their own marketplace.

Re: Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’

#326

Post by mrep »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #314
mrep wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there are substitutes for everything except the IOS distribution one. I also agree that most of these metrics are not true monopolies. However, I'm using the term "monopoly" in the way the EU sees it when enacting antitrust fines to curtail this type of behavior because what they basically use is >50% in some arbitrarily chosen metric (percent of of smartphones running an OS used for the EUs recent 5 bil…

The problem with what the EU is doing is that they aren't interested in applying a rigorous standard. It's perfectly possible to define markets or abuse in various ways, but if all they're really doing is to backfill reasoning to justify enormous fines on American businesses there is no point in arguing about what is in practice a rationalization, and the response if they continue to use such ambiguous rules probably…

Wow, I cannot upvote you enough.

> The problem with what the EU is doing is that they aren't interested in applying a rigorous standard.

Yeah, this is what I and a lot of other people have a problem with these EU antitrust laws and even GDPR . In the google case, they literally had the android play clauses set from day 1 when they had 0% market share and instead of telling google that they could no longer bundle chrome/search to the play store now that they reached 50% market share in mobile OS (their magic antitrust metric), they waited 7 years and then threw a ridiculous fine at them. If the laws were clear, this wouldn't be a problem.

Re: Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’

#327

Post by fjsolwmv »

imgabe wrote: post #197
avar wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really screwed up even as a consumer. E.g. for things like Uber I've taken to always rating 5 stars regardless of my experience, because even if I have something bad to say do I really want to so nonchalantly be a cog in the machine of potentially robbing someone of their livelyhood?

Yeah, the way Uber ratings work it seems like there are only two ratings: "I had an acceptable experience" or "This person should lose their job".

What else matters when choosing a car hire?

Re: Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’

#328

Post by fjsolwmv »

freehunter wrote: post #322
scarface74 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most non game apps shouldn't be apps. They should be web pages. It would be faster development and you wouldn't be dependent on the app stores. A torrent remote app would never be allowed on the IOS app store, but going to https://remote.vuze.com and pairing your Vuze app can't be banned....

If it was easier to pin a web page to your home screen, I think this would catch on more. I run a website and I get requests a lot saying "you should have an app!" I ask what the app would do, and they say "what the website does, but stuck on my home screen." It's also unfortunate that web pages have the disadvantage that they have the browser UI around them, so it reduces the space available to the page versus an ap…

Modern web browsers have already solved all these problems.

Re: Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’

#329

Post by fjsolwmv »

mnm1 wrote: post #312
cptaj wrote: post #135

And they should. We are fast approaching a world where all markets are walled-in by a few international companies. I've had clients of mine go under because Amazon decided to close their accounts and they depend on the platform to sell their wares. Imagine how hard it is to sell stuff online if you're barred from ebay and amazon... and there is no legal recourse to appeal those bans. Same goes for app stores, what ha…

And yet these stores aren't considered a monopoly? There is no competition and no one can make an app and distribute it outside the store in Apple's case, but no you can go to Google where the situation is virtually the same. Regulation is the only thing that can possibly fix it. If it's a touchy subject for people, people need to be less sensitive and ask themselves what else could possibly be a solution? Do people…

It's a trust, not a monopoly. Antitrust law should apply.

Re: Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’

#330

Post by zaroth »

tw04 wrote: post #150
ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #10

Doesn't Valve take 30% from games on Steam? But they're complaining Apple taking 30% is too much? I also don't really think the Apple/Google fee is that unreasonable. Considering the resources, tools, marketplaces, tutorials, payment processing, all the other All dev stuff they provide in general. Yes if your app goes big, they make a lot of money. But for every big app there's something like 9 that fail completely (…

If every app I downloaded were several to several 10s of gigabytes of data, I might be more inclined to cut them some slack. 30% on a 5MB download is pretty tough to justify. The cost of storing and transferring that file is a rounding error.

What makes you think the 30% cut is to pay for the bandwidth of the file transfer?

The entire platform the app runs on was created by Apple. The hardware, the OS, the programming language, the SDKs.

Thousands of APIs used to build the apps, maybe a million pages of documentation on those APIs.

All the toolchain to develop, build, test, and deploy apps for purchase in hundreds of countries including customer profiles, billing, and support.

Billions of dollars of iCloud infrastructure for backend services to support everything from push notifications, data sync, backup, automatic updates, etc.

Then you get into the actual app store and you have all the work that went into the UX there for discovering, installing, buying and reviewing apps. In-app purchases and subscription services to support different business models. Family sharing, parental controls, parental approval requirements for kids’ phones.

I could go on for hours and probably still miss huge swaths of functionality that Apple invested millions of dollars into, just so that you could pull up chair and with a few lines of code start writing an app that can reach billions of devices.

Not to mention all the marketing and training and support Apple does to prime their customers to be big users of the App Store.

Yeah, and the bandwidth to download the app as well.

Personally I think 30% is a steal for what you get in return.

Oh, and I’ll just add one more thing; you can distribute your app for free and you pay Apple nothing (or nearly nothing) for the benefit of all their hard work and infrastructure and support.

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