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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’

#421

Post by buboard »

valuearb wrote: post #386
buboard wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple made $11 billion from apps in 2017. I doubt they spent more than $1B on app distribution. You d have to add research costs to go up to 10%.

I guarantee they spent more. The host over 2 million apps, in hundreds of geographic locations. With updates, they are distributing billions of releases and updates a year. And some of those apps exceed a gigabyte in size. Outside of raw bandwidth and storage costs, someone has to run those tens of thousands of servers across the world, and manage development of the distribution software. Then you need sales and mark…

You wouldnt count ios development as a cost that apple pays for developers, its the price they pay to lure developers. Just like MS develops windows APIs for free. Developers work for apple, not vice versa, the question is if apple is paying them enough.

App ecosystems or platforms were since decades free for developers, because platforms need developers more than viceversa. Apple’s case is unique, and it comes from their preexisting culture of a cultish, high-paying customer base. It is unfortunate that google and ms. copied their model, i think android app distribution should be free. At this point, i dont think they even did it for the money, but more for appearing to be ‘serious’ in their offering. It was a marketing decision.

If it had been free from the start , companies wouldnt have invested so much on building increasingly higher walled gardens. Apps would be on the web, and some third party would have done a better job of organizing and reviewing them.

I doubt app stores are a big cost as you say. It is pretty obvious from their quality that these companies just dont care about them. They use them to lock in developers.

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

#422

Post by jsjohnst »

jjeaff wrote: post #360
jsjohnst wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All Apple has to do to offer an alternative is let people install Apps on their phones outside the App Store This exists now and is free. I’m not saying it’s a good user experience (especially the one week limitation), but it’s definitely possible and legit / legal / free.

Sideloading on iOS is a bad enough user experience to be effectively useless.

Depends on the use case. For the intended purpose it’s not useless, but far from great either.

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

#423

Post by baby »

felipelemos wrote: post #281
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.

If the food is the only thing that should matter everyone should be ordering for delivery. The service counts so much as the food in my opinion.

Eating chinese with a large group is done at the restaurant. Food is at the utmost importance. If you are willing to go eat worse food for better service then you should not be rating restaurants.

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

#424

Post by baby »

mislankanova wrote: post #354
adrianratnapala wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't make a blanket statement like "the food is the only thing that should matter"; but for some Chinese restaurants, bad service is part of the fun. My favourite is "Oriental Canteen" near South Kensington station. At lunchtime I would order takeway, and then go browse a neighbouring bookshop. One day, as I was heading back the manager (who was rude on the best of days) just wordlessly held the bag with my lun…

Push the ‘impoliteness and efficiency’ to the extreme and you get the Australia Dairy Company in Hong Kong, a restaurant where the service is so bad that tourists come to experience it... And I agree with how you feel about the Oriental Canteen. A really inexpensive place to get a quick meal. Can’t expect much more from it.

If we’re sharing then:

* jiaba: for taiwanese food

* orient: best dimsum

* joyluck: good hotpot

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

#425

Post by taylodl »

makecheck wrote: post #32

The 30% cut would have been reasonable after all this time if the platforms were doing anything useful with the money. Instead, we got: - Store APIs that to this day are stupidly complex to get right in all cases, making you wonder why it’s so hard - No support for very common, decades-old pricing schemes like “free demo, then buy” (except through convoluted means) - Stagnant app store designs (esp. Mac, for YEARS) -…

This. No one would have a problem paying 30% if the store was actually providing some value. Instead, we get no ability to demo. We get no ability to version - I'll continue supporting you for free for version X, but I'll cut you a deal for version Y if you already own version X. No, they make it convoluted for both the consumers and the developers. It just sucks all the way around. And we pay 30% for this mess.

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

#426

Post by grey_earthling »

damon_c wrote: post #209
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…

My GF and I recently moved from NYC to Los Angeles and an Uber driver once asked her "Are you from NY?", "Yes, why?", "Because your rating is so low and people from NYC usually have really low ratings." We checked her rating and it's 4.5 or so. But it's funny, she looks like a deadbeat here because of more discerning/critical NYC Uber drivers who gave her 4 stars 50% of the time.

I preferred the world when more things were like an xkcd comic, rather than like a Black Mirror episode.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive

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

#428

Post by zaroth »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #377
zaroth wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> You want to make it illegal for someone to make a piece of hardware that can only run binaries signed by the manufacturer? I'm not sure why this is supposed to be controversial. It's not a prohibition on checking signatures, it's just a requirement to give the user the option of doing something else. Once you sell something it's not yours anymore. Companies shouldn't be allowed to stick up everyone in an ancillary…

>> Consumers have spoken, and spoken extremely loudly, that they like Apple’s approach.

> This is not really supported by the evidence...

This isn’t about Apple vs Android or market share. The success of iOS speaks for itself, and in particular the success of the App Store speaks for itself. It is self-evident from the billions of dollars that apps have earned (is it tens of billions now?) that the model is successful and widely used both by developers and consumers. Apple users are much more prolific spenders on the Apple App Store than users of the Android market as well, the majority of that money going directly to developers. This is partly demographics, but also partly the security, reliability, and trust provided by the walled garden.

> And given a choice between a distribution method that restricts apps and then charges 30% more and one that doesn't and has lower prices

As long as apps that are not sold through the Apple Store do not use any Apple APIs to operate, that would be fair.

But if you want to use the massive infrastructure that Apple has built [1] then I think you have to play by Apple’s rules.

The iPhone is a device which you own, yes, but it is also a massive collection of services which Apple spends 10s of billions of dollars developing and supporting in order to deliver the overall experience.

As an app developer, the APIs, services, documentation, training, support, and marketing combine to justify the 30%. The “App Store” application itself, and all the search, discovery, reviews, auto-updates, billing, services, and support is just one piece of the massive infra that Apple provides to all the apps running on its platform.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17823937

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

#429

Post by adossi »

ehsankia wrote: post #372
nielsbot wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion is that everyone should get rid of 1-5 stars in favor of "thumbs up/thumbs down" ratings... Wonder if there's any research to support this suggestion...

I fully agree with you, but we all saw how that went for Netflix. Some people are still angry at them for it. But yea, I can't even with good conscience give anything 4 star or less, knowing that it will basically destroy their job. So I only even vote low if it's a truly horrible experience.

Netflix's system wasn't so much a thumbs up/thumbs down system that we all know and love - it was a frankenstein system where you couldn't see how many thumbs up/down a title had, rather you saw a percentage on how likely you are to enjoy that title based on the thumbs you gave others. At first glance it looks like YouTube's system but in actuality it was very different.

https://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-thumbs-rating-system...

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

#430

Post by MattSayar »

duxup wrote: post #352
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.

Do you find Yelp helpful? I find Yelp so strange with complaints about how someplace that really doesn't do someone's favorite food style gets some stupid reviews.... or they wish a place was more like a place that is 3x more expensive (how is that fair?). I just have no clue where anyone is coming from. We had a Neapolitan pizza place open up in in our neighborhood. Great ingredients, amazing Neapolitan pizza. It wa…

Unfortunately that involves actually reading the reviews instead of looking at the rating.
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