If you haven't watched Tim Sweeney's appearance on Lex Fridman (which went live two days ago ironically), he discusses this battle against Apple, which he's maintained at a furious pace for years. He goes into detail on how the previous guidelines stifle innovation, how app developers are basically forced to implement anti-consumer practices to maintain the ridiculous costs of achieving success on the app store, etc.…
> No gambling, no randomized loot boxes, etc. > So I give Tim a lot of credit for maintaining such a principled stance. IMO, someone that drives and capitalizes on addictive spending by an underage audience should never be considered principled. While it may not be considered gambling, it’s not much better when it’s often out of control due to feeding on FOMO.
Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US
341–350 of 365 posts
Re: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US
#342If you haven't watched Tim Sweeney's appearance on Lex Fridman (which went live two days ago ironically), he discusses this battle against Apple, which he's maintained at a furious pace for years. He goes into detail on how the previous guidelines stifle innovation, how app developers are basically forced to implement anti-consumer practices to maintain the ridiculous costs of achieving success on the app store, etc.…
Re: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US
#343So, what keeps all app developers from charging 0 to "buy" the app from the store, then nickel and dime the user inside the app? This really feels like the beginning of things way worse.
Re: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
Name one platform or even retail physical goods store that has less than a 15% markup from the wholesale price?
As I said, my point is just that it's not something I should be obligated to pay for. But, if you're looking for counterexamples to show it can be done for less than a 15% cut, they're around. Almost every eBay category charges less than 15%, for example. And, as another user pointed out, Epic takes less than 15%. AliExpress charges 5-8% on average. Etsy is I think something like 6.5%.
eBay charges a final value fee of 12.9% and $.30 - $0.40 flat fee per order. And you pay a fee for international orders.
Re: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
Name one platform or even retail physical goods store that has less than a 15% markup from the wholesale price?
Why is a middleman required at all? Epic seems happy to process their own payments - they don't need a "platform" to do it for them.
Re: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US
#346If you haven't watched Tim Sweeney's appearance on Lex Fridman (which went live two days ago ironically), he discusses this battle against Apple, which he's maintained at a furious pace for years. He goes into detail on how the previous guidelines stifle innovation, how app developers are basically forced to implement anti-consumer practices to maintain the ridiculous costs of achieving success on the app store, etc.…
The only reason he is fighting Apple's monopoly on IAP is because he wants to ship the Epic store on mobile devices so he can make his 12% cut off exclusive titles. Now is that better than the Apple store? Sure! But the real problem is that users can't install their own games without going through an arbiter like Epic or Apple.
Re: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US
#347Crazy. I thought hackernews didn’t care because this happened yesterday and I never saw anything! We’re updating our app in a couple days this will save a LOT of money. We will kick users out to web and pass a JWT in the url with a short lifespan to log the user in on web and then prompt for Apple Pay or credit card. Then a link back to our app’s deep link
So many questions: - Why not just handle all of this in the app? Do you think Apple won't allow it? - Are you geofencing this functionality? It seems like per other comments this is US only. - How are you handling existing subscribers (not sure if applicable)? Will you "encourage" them to migrate?
Re: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good enough is how everything went to shit (enshitification). "It's an MVP? Good enough, ship it and bolt on features no one wants." Personally, I am very tired of "good enough." I wish we built great things.
"Enshitification" is probably the most self-sabotaging term we could think of; in terms of how it makes us look like whining teenagers. I will never use it in polite conversation; which would ironically be a tech company's greatest goal for if we had a word. But optics aside, this also ignores the problem that many of these businesses were not sustainable and were never sustainable . They are heading downhill, partia…
This is a form of price dumping and it should be illegal. Actually I'm confused as to why this isn't considered to be illegal already becuase I thought we had laws against this.
Re: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bloated and overcomplicated are design issues, not technology issues. Plenty of native apps are bloated and overcomplicated. Making good apps is hard.
> Bloated and overcomplicated are design issues, not technology issues. No, it's very much a technology issue. The overhead just for shipping an entire webbrowser with your app is insane. Building a decent UI in HTML/CSS which were never designed for that purpose, is an absolute disaster. HTML and CSS are for formatting text documents, not for designing user interfaces. There is a reason that there is a framework-of-…
Tell me you know nothing about security without tell me you know nothing about security. Desktop software is a nightmare... and they can still be as bloated as the most bloated webapp.