41–50 of 84 posts
Marco's proposal fails to incorporate the fact that the fees collected help pay for the App Store... It's not free to create and maintain.
2 trillion dollar company doesn't get to tell sob stories how they're struggling to serve these apps while reporting that their services are hugely profitable and growing.
If IAP was so great and in consumers' best interest, surely consumers would still choose it even if they knew it's 10x more expensive than card processing.
I don't have a problem with the app store rules, for apps that are in the app store. What i do have a major problem with is the inability to use a third party app store with different rules. Marco is opposed to this - primarily because it offsets the immediate advantage he would get if Apple was forced to abandon IAP, while also making him have to possibly go with multiple app stores - but legally I don't think the g…
I disagree. Sandboxing is designed to prevent your phone from being compromised but it doesn't prevent bad actors from using legitimate APIs in malicious ways.
As an example, the App Store review guidelines enforce certain privacy restrictions such as not allowing third-party analytics or advertising in apps designed for children. This is not something that is intended to be enforced via sandboxing.
Edit: As another example, consider an app that might request access to your contacts for a legitimate purpose (like messaging), but then secretly transmits and stores that data for an alternative purpose (like selling your contacts to third parties). Also possible within the sandbox but forbidden by the review guidelines. Now, I'm not saying the review process is going to catch all abuses of legitimate APIs ahead of time, but at least there is an enforcement mechanism if the bad actor gets caught.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No I mean regardless of which processor you use Apple still takes a 30% cut of all digital sales on iOS. So if you use PayPal you pay Apple 30% and PayPals fees too. Because Apple isn't charging 30% to be your payment processor, they're charging 30% for the ability to sell your goods on iOS at all.
It's not just the ability to sell goods on iOS. It's the reviewing of the app, the upgrades, any App Store curation, any developer support, the iOS itself, etc. That said, I think 30% is too high as an industry standard for software. The one thing I think that might be the most costly for Apple are all the free apps on the App Store. I know you need to pay $99 a year but as they are free Apple sees nothing in return…
How many people do you think would buy an iPhone if you couldn’t use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or some of the other really big free apps? They NEED those apps.
Apple could easily afford to pay for all the costs of the App Store from purchases of hardware. The $99 is just gravy.
The argument that they NEED the 30% to make up for the “freeloaders” that don’t charge for apps (as Apple seems to suggest) is ridiculous.
Apple gets a tremendous value out of the entire app ecosystem, i’d be willing to bet it’s quite a bit more than 30% they end up collecting.
At this point I think I’d like to see Apple allow a form of third-party payment. It works well enough on the web without tons of scams, it could be done on the iPhone. Let developers choose between any “certified“ payment provider. Apple would be one, and then you could add Square, PayPal, and other big companies that could jump through Apple’s hoops. Like making sure the refund experience is easy so no one can make…
I think they are preparing for that moment already! Saw this job posting for partner payment systems: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/1995030919/
---- The problems with letting all apps advertise external payment systems:
• Someone may publish a free app to avoid paying anything to Apple, and then charge users [an asston of] money to ""unlock"" via an alternate payment system.
• Users may not be able to see a list of all in-app purchases (and their guaranteed prices) as they can on the App Store, without downloading the app.
• Sharing your payment details and other information with multiple entities, and having to continually trust each of them (e.g. to not abuse or leak).
• Confused users may clog up Apple's customer support with complaints related to third-party payment systems.
• Angry users may demand Apple to offer refunds for shit that was paid for via third-party payment systems.
---- The problems with allowing third-party app stores on iOS:
• How will iOS sandboxing be enforced for apps delivered via third-party stores? Will those apps still have to be submitted to and signed by Apple?
• Store apps would need the privilege to write binaries on your iPhone. How will that privilege be regulated to prevent abuse? e.g. what happens if a store starts writing malware?
• Users may sometimes have to wait longer for an app to update on one store than on others (as already happens on Steam vs GoG).
• Developers would no longer be assured that they will have access to literally all the users that iOS has, by publishing on just one store.
You would have to submit to each store, wait for approval on each of them, update for each of them... to come close to the userbase that you can currently access by just publishing once on the App Store.
• Developers will no longer all play by the same rules. One store may allow some content while another may prohibit it.
For example, take porn: Should any third-party store be allowed to serve apps with "adult" content, or will they still ultimately be bound by Apple's ruling on such matters?
• iOS Parental Control settings may be ineffective on other stores (and browsers if third-party engines were allowed too).
• If an app or game is exclusive to a store that a user isn't already using, they would have to create a new account and download an additional app just to access that one exclusive.
• Not all stores may be compatible with the iOS backup and restore system, or the APIs for app-thinning and on-demand resources.
Marco's proposal fails to incorporate the fact that the fees collected help pay for the App Store... It's not free to create and maintain.
The costs to run the App Store are probably something like 0.1% of the fees collected on apps. Apple collected $15 billion from the app store in 2019. I'd wager that $15 million would cover the operating costs, which I'd guess are largely the salaries of app reviewers. Even if I'm off by 2 orders of magnitude, that still leaves 90% of Apple's cut as profit. The app store is a huge driver toward selling the hardware.…
So, their (likely) largest expense is 0.5% of their total revenue. Even if I'm off by a factor of 10, the numbers are absolutely mind-blowing.
I hope Apple takes notice of the path their walking down right now. When people like Marco are calling them out on their bullshit it's a clear indicator that they've pushed the envelope too far. Alienating 3rd party developers is the same mistake that nearly cost Microsoft everything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Downvotes and upvotes being hidden is the only thing keeping HN from devolving into reddit. Otherwise, people would just agree with whatever had the biggest number instead of (hopefully) applying some critical thinking.
I'm not talking about the quantity, I'm talking about a list of who upvoted and downvoted a specific comment/post. Also what you've described happens anyway. The fact that a number isn't displayed doesn't really matter when comments are ultimately ordered by score. When someone writes a comment that doesn't adhere to the current groupthink, they get downvoted. When people are downvoted too much they delete their comm…