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Apple is threatening to remove Fanhouse unless they give 30% of creator earning

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Re: Apple is threatening to remove Fanhouse unless they give 30% of creator earning

#421

Post by valparaiso »

smoldesu wrote: post #29
syntaxing wrote: post #2

Seriously curious, what percentage is “fair”? Or is the issue you can’t side load this app without going through the App Store?

The issue is that Apple continues to inroad services and tools through their own proprietary systems, which gives them a better excuse to mark up their products. Giving users the choice of marketplaces gives Apple incentive to stay competitive in an otherwise monopolistic software segment.

They built their closed platform from scratch on mature market with Nokia and Blackberry and made the lowest fee (in 2008) that’s why developers started making apps for iPhones. You think 30% is high while it was best choice in 2008. Now zoomers don’t want to pay fees and want everything for free.

Re: Apple is threatening to remove Fanhouse unless they give 30% of creator earning

#422

Post by feross »

mkishi wrote: post #273
amelius wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the argument is that they (1) host the software in the cloud which costs them money, and (2) they review software for e.g. security issues which costs them money. Anyway, the EU is coming for them: https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro... > The Digital Markets Act (DMA) establishes a set of narrowly defined objective criteria for qualifying a large online platform as a so-called “gatek…

It does cost them money, but I can't wrap my mind on why that's not subsidized by the rest of the Apple machine. Didn't customers pay a premium for Apple hardware because of the unified ecosystem and superior security to begin with? And developers also pay a premium to be on the App Store ($99+30%) because it costs them money to create the infrastructure and ensure safety? I'm pretty ignorant on the whole situation,…

Apple recently suggested to Australian authorities that Apple can't possibly have a monopoly on app distribution since they have no restrictions against PWAs which "have the look, feel and functionality of a native app". [1]

As someone currently building an app-like website – https://wormhole.app – let me tell you that Apple's neglect and underinvestment in the web platform definitely precludes websites or "PWAs" from having the "have the look, feel and functionality of a native app". Safari suffers from the twin effects of (1) limitations that Apple has intentionally put in place and (2) intentional under-staffing of the Safari team. Here's how it's affected us:

- Apple recently broke our website by adding support for a new API `blob.stream()` in Safari 14.1 (which we correctly feature-detected) but when you call the function you get a null pointer exception which crashes the renderer process [2]. Worse, the bugs was fixed on `master` several months before Safari was released but it wasn't included in the release.

- IndexedDB has been full of bugs for years and shows very slow signs of improvement. We have no other storage options on Safari, so we're stuck using their buggy implementation.

- Safari limits websites to using 1GB of temporary space after which the app must prompt the user for an additional allocation, each 200MB at a time. So if the app needs 5GB of space (for example, a video editing application, or in our case a P2P-enabled file sending app), then the user will need to click "okay" on twenty prompts for 200MB more space each to make the app work. Needless to say, this is totally ridiculous and definitely not an API that Apple would ever find acceptable to ship for native iOS apps.

- If we choose to use in-memory storage then Safari warns the user that our website is using lots of RAM. So that's not a real option.

- We can't offer streaming download + decryption from our servers because Safari's ServiceWorker implementation doesn't allow intercepting HTTP requests for file downloads.

- Missing many APIs that would actually let websites truly compete with native apps. Just a few that we use:

  * Web Share Target API (https://web.dev/web-share-target)

  * File System Access API (https://web.dev/file-system-access)
- I could go on...

It's hard to see Apple's decisions here as anything but outright hostile to the web and designed to push developers into making native apps.

[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Apple%20Pty%20Limited%2...

[2] https://twitter.com/feross/status/1386835131780931587

Re: Apple is threatening to remove Fanhouse unless they give 30% of creator earning

#423

Post by valparaiso »

mdoms wrote: post #45
falcolas wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Google charges 30%. Microsoft (for the XBox, not sure about their store) 30%. Sony (PS4) 30%. Steam was 30%, but this is dropping. Nintendo's is well protected by NDAs, but reportedly 15-30%. 30% is pretty close to a standard when you're providing the storefront and control the hardware.

Google allows other payment providers in apps without mandating their own provider. Same with Steam. I don't know about Microsoft or Sony.

They forbid this (bypass Google Pay Billing) for games that’s why Epics are suing Google with Apple at the same time since both companies kicked out Fortnite after malicious hotpatch.

Re: Apple is threatening to remove Fanhouse unless they give 30% of creator earning

#424

Post by heavyset_go »

wernercd wrote: post #399
threatofrain wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's notable that Google does allow their customers to side-load apps.

and Google doesn't ban use of other payment processors or have restrictions on "you can sell elsewhere for less"

> and Google doesn't ban use of other payment processors

They certainly do on the Play Store. Developers have until September of this year to comply with Google's rule to take 30% of sales and use its payment system[1] in their apps.

It's clearly more price fixing on the part of the Apple and Google mobile app distribution and payments cartel.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/28/google-to-enforce-30percent-...

Re: Apple is threatening to remove Fanhouse unless they give 30% of creator earning

#425

Post by [deleted] »

valparaiso wrote: post #409
Barrin92 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

brand and marketing power. Apple is the cool developer brand and devs with their sticker filled macbooks and consumers don't have a critical attitude when it comes to Apple. It's really funny. Imagine if every independent game developer who has ever built videogames for Windows had to pay a third of their revenue to Microsoft, and had to go through a store review to get their games approved. Would we ever had some of…

Why are you comparing open and closed platforms when they aren’t comparable? Try now with Microsoft Xbox and iOs and your logic fails.

[deleted]

Re: Apple is threatening to remove Fanhouse unless they give 30% of creator earning

#426

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

bsaul wrote: post #287
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standard argument that a 30% is ok for video games but not ok for the App Store is that games are special and different. I don’t find it convincing. I think a better argument is that a 30% cut is wrong full stop, but going after phone app stores is a higher enforcement priority because the stakes are higher. An increasing portion of commerce is digital, and increasing portion is happening on phones. Apple will tr…

The argument with videogame consoles was that console makers were actually loosing money on each console sold, and would make up for it by taking a larger cut on each game sold. This is of course very different from apple business model.

As well as the cost of running first-party QA processes, namely that “Nintendo Seal of Quality” that was instigated to prevent a repeat of the 1980s video game crash, precipitated by a slew of awful shovelware games for the Atari 2600 in particular).

Apple does have their app-review thing - but they said it’s paid-for by the $99 fee, so the 30% cut with all the other Kafkaesque restrictions is not a tenable position.

Anyway - my company stopped publishing to the iOS App Store over a year ago and switched to PWAs and no-regrets here at all.

Re: Apple is threatening to remove Fanhouse unless they give 30% of creator earning

#427

Post by slver »

stale2002 wrote: post #347
slver wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait so "because [Apple] have a monopoly" (which isn't correct, but let's put that aside) they can push an app and then act surprised about Apple enforcing the ToS they agreed to? Yeah that's not good enough.

> about Apple enforcing the ToS An illegally anti-competitive ToS is the point though.

Don't declare things "illegal" when they've not been.

Re: Apple is threatening to remove Fanhouse unless they give 30% of creator earning

#428

Post by valparaiso »

salamandersauce wrote: post #4
syntaxing wrote: post #2

Seriously curious, what percentage is “fair”? Or is the issue you can’t side load this app without going through the App Store?

If Apple wants to play gatekeeper, no percentage IMO unless they're using Apple's payment network which should be competitive with others like stripe at 3% or so. In this case they actually are willing to pay Apple, just 30% of their revenue which is 10% of the transaction price but Apple wants 30% of the transaction price.

They planned their business after reading App Store rules and now want to bypass it. That’s not how the business work. They will fail in court very badly because they accepted the rules and know all consequences.

Re: Apple is threatening to remove Fanhouse unless they give 30% of creator earning

#429

Post by michaelmrose »

kmeisthax wrote: post #406
michaelmrose wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct if they did this virtually every really big player would opt out and offer a package on their website. See the MS and apple desktop store.

Which is exactly why Apple users specifically do not want third-party app distribution at all. This isn't just blind fanboyism, either: PC gamers absolutely loathe Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store, because they want their entire collection of software to live on Steam. Yes, a decade and change ago everyone hated Steam, but now it's the established way of doing things. The more developer-friendly, competitive…

This is you really liking the mall experience where stores are paying twice as much rent to be in the mall and trying to make it illegal for shops to do business outside the mall to maximize your shopping experience. You and the mall are both in love with the idea.

If you want to shop in the mall vote with your wallet if there isn't enough demand to convince merchants to situate themselves there then deal with it.

Laws forcing merchants and customers into the mall ought to be themselves illegal.

Re: Apple is threatening to remove Fanhouse unless they give 30% of creator earning

#430

Post by valparaiso »

JamesSwift wrote: post #155
syntaxing wrote: post #2

Seriously curious, what percentage is “fair”? Or is the issue you can’t side load this app without going through the App Store?

The issue isn't really if 30% is "fair", its that the market has no way to find out if it is because apple have forced devs into their app ecosystem by deliberately keeping iOS browsers slightly worse than native apps (no push messaging or background processing). So there is no viable way for an alternate store, with an alternate fee structure, to run on iOS devices.

How Apple forced anyone when they launched App Store in mature mobile market in 2008 where everyone was telling iPhone is “failed product”.
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